Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have garnered significant attention for their potential in advancing robotic manipulation. However, previous approaches predominantly rely on the general comprehension capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) to generate action signals, often overlooking the rich temporal and causal structure embedded in visual observations. In this paper, we present UniVLA, a unified and native multimodal VLA model that autoregressively models vision, language, and action signals as discrete token sequences. This formulation enables flexible multimodal tasks learning, particularly from large-scale video data. By incorporating world modeling during post-training, UniVLA captures causal dynamics from videos, facilitating effective transfer to downstream policy learning--especially for long-horizon tasks. Our approach sets new state-of-the-art results across several widely used simulation benchmarks, including CALVIN, LIBERO, and Simplenv-Bridge, significantly surpassing previous methods. For example, UniVLA achieves 95.5% average success rate on LIBERO benchmark, surpassing pi0-FAST's 85.5%. We further demonstrate its broad applicability on real-world ALOHA manipulation and autonomous driving.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in video-language tasks, yet their application to long video understanding remains constrained by the quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms. In this paper, we propose \textbf{PEVLM}, a parallel encoding strategy specifically designed to improve the prefill efficiency of VLMs without requiring model finetuning. PEVLM partitions the input into block-wise segments with a shared sink, preserves full-attention positional embeddings, and aligns attention weights to mimic full-attention distributions. This design reduces attention computation from $O((T \times N)^2)$ to $O(T \times N)$ while maintaining high accuracy. Extensive experiments on the LongVideoBench benchmark show that PEVLM achieves up to 8.37\% accuracy improvement over existing inference-efficient methods and delivers up to 7.47x speedup in attention computation and 40\% reduction in end-to-end latency. Under strict latency constraints, PEVLM significantly outperforms baselines, raising accuracy from 23.26\% to 61.03\%. These results highlight PEVLM's effectiveness for low-latency, long-context video understanding, making it well-suited for real-world applications such as autonomous driving.
Understanding the short-term motion of vulnerable road users (VRUs) like pedestrians and cyclists is critical for safe autonomous driving, especially in urban scenarios with ambiguous or high-risk behaviors. While vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled open-vocabulary perception, their utility for fine-grained intent reasoning remains underexplored. Notably, no existing benchmark evaluates multi-class intent prediction in safety-critical situations, To address this gap, we introduce DRAMA-X, a fine-grained benchmark constructed from the DRAMA dataset via an automated annotation pipeline. DRAMA-X contains 5,686 accident-prone frames labeled with object bounding boxes, a nine-class directional intent taxonomy, binary risk scores, expert-generated action suggestions for the ego vehicle, and descriptive motion summaries. These annotations enable a structured evaluation of four interrelated tasks central to autonomous decision-making: object detection, intent prediction, risk assessment, and action suggestion. As a reference baseline, we propose SGG-Intent, a lightweight, training-free framework that mirrors the ego vehicle's reasoning pipeline. It sequentially generates a scene graph from visual input using VLM-backed detectors, infers intent, assesses risk, and recommends an action using a compositional reasoning stage powered by a large language model. We evaluate a range of recent VLMs, comparing performance across all four DRAMA-X tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that scene-graph-based reasoning enhances intent prediction and risk assessment, especially when contextual cues are explicitly modeled.
With the increasing presence of automated vehicles on open roads under driver supervision, disengagement cases are becoming more prevalent. While some data-driven planning systems attempt to directly utilize these disengagement cases for policy improvement, the inherent scarcity of disengagement data (often occurring as a single instances) restricts training effectiveness. Furthermore, some disengagement data should be excluded since the disengagement may not always come from the failure of driving policies, e.g. the driver may casually intervene for a while. To this end, this work proposes disengagement-reason-augmented reinforcement learning (DRARL), which enhances driving policy improvement process according to the reason of disengagement cases. Specifically, the reason of disengagement is identified by a out-of-distribution (OOD) state estimation model. When the reason doesn't exist, the case will be identified as a casual disengagement case, which doesn't require additional policy adjustment. Otherwise, the policy can be updated under a reason-augmented imagination environment, improving the policy performance of disengagement cases with similar reasons. The method is evaluated using real-world disengagement cases collected by autonomous driving robotaxi. Experimental results demonstrate that the method accurately identifies policy-related disengagement reasons, allowing the agent to handle both original and semantically similar cases through reason-augmented training. Furthermore, the approach prevents the agent from becoming overly conservative after policy adjustments. Overall, this work provides an efficient way to improve driving policy performance with disengagement cases.
Multi-sensor fusion perception (MSFP) is a key technology for embodied AI, which can serve a variety of downstream tasks (e.g., 3D object detection and semantic segmentation) and application scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving and swarm robotics). Recently, impressive achievements on AI-based MSFP methods have been reviewed in relevant surveys. However, we observe that the existing surveys have some limitations after a rigorous and detailed investigation. For one thing, most surveys are oriented to a single task or research field, such as 3D object detection or autonomous driving. Therefore, researchers in other related tasks often find it difficult to benefit directly. For another, most surveys only introduce MSFP from a single perspective of multi-modal fusion, while lacking consideration of the diversity of MSFP methods, such as multi-view fusion and time-series fusion. To this end, in this paper, we hope to organize MSFP research from a task-agnostic perspective, where methods are reported from various technical views. Specifically, we first introduce the background of MSFP. Next, we review multi-modal and multi-agent fusion methods. A step further, time-series fusion methods are analyzed. In the era of LLM, we also investigate multimodal LLM fusion methods. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions for MSFP. We hope this survey can help researchers understand the important progress in MSFP and provide possible insights for future research.
Transfer learning enhances the training of novel sensory and decision models by employing rich feature representations from large, pre-trained teacher models. Cognitive neuroscience shows that the human brain creates low-dimensional, abstract representations for efficient sensorimotor coding. Importantly, the brain can learn these representations with significantly fewer data points and less computational power than artificial models require. We introduce Brain2Model Transfer Learning (B2M), a framework where neural activity from human sensory and decision-making tasks acts as the teacher model for training artificial neural networks. We propose two B2M strategies: (1) Brain Contrastive Transfer, which aligns brain activity and network activations through a contrastive objective; and (2) Brain Latent Transfer, which projects latent dynamics from similar cognitive tasks onto student networks via supervised regression of brain-derived features. We validate B2M in memory-based decision-making with a recurrent neural network and scene reconstruction for autonomous driving with a variational autoencoder. The results show that student networks benefiting from brain-based transfer converge faster and achieve higher predictive accuracy than networks trained in isolation. Our findings indicate that the brain's representations are valuable for artificial learners, paving the way for more efficient learning of complex decision-making representations, which would be costly or slow through purely artificial training.
Recent developments in 3D Gaussian Splatting have made significant advances in surface reconstruction. However, scaling these methods to large-scale scenes remains challenging due to high computational demands and the complex dynamic appearances typical of outdoor environments. These challenges hinder the application in aerial surveying and autonomous driving. This paper proposes a novel solution to reconstruct large-scale surfaces with fine details, supervised by full-sized images. Firstly, we introduce a coarse-to-fine strategy to reconstruct a coarse model efficiently, followed by adaptive scene partitioning and sub-scene refining from image segments. Additionally, we integrate a decoupling appearance model to capture global appearance variations and a transient mask model to mitigate interference from moving objects. Finally, we expand the multi-view constraint and introduce a single-view regularization for texture-less areas. Our experiments were conducted on the publicly available dataset GauU-Scene V2, which was captured using unmanned aerial vehicles. To the best of our knowledge, our method outperforms existing NeRF-based and Gaussian-based methods, achieving high-fidelity visual results and accurate surface from full-size image optimization. Open-source code will be available on GitHub.
This work investigates the use of multimodal biometrics to detect distractions caused by smartphone use during tasks that require sustained attention, with a focus on computer-based online learning. Although the methods are applicable to various domains, such as autonomous driving, we concentrate on the challenges learners face in maintaining engagement amid internal (e.g., motivation), system-related (e.g., course design) and contextual (e.g., smartphone use) factors. Traditional learning platforms often lack detailed behavioral data, but Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) and biosensors provide new insights into learner attention. We propose an AI-based approach that leverages physiological signals and head pose data to detect phone use. Our results show that single biometric signals, such as brain waves or heart rate, offer limited accuracy, while head pose alone achieves 87%. A multimodal model combining all signals reaches 91% accuracy, highlighting the benefits of integration. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of deploying these models for real-time support in online learning environments.
Point cloud-based object/place recognition remains a problem of interest in applications such as autonomous driving, scene reconstruction, and localization. Extracting meaningful local descriptors from a query point cloud that can be matched with the descriptors of the collected point clouds is a challenging problem. Furthermore, when the query point cloud is noisy or has been transformed (e.g., rotated), it adds to the complexity. To this end, we propose a novel methodology, named TDACloud, using Topological Data Analysis (TDA) for local descriptor extraction from a point cloud, which does not need resource-intensive GPU-based machine learning training. More specifically, we used the ATOL vectorization method to generate vectors for point clouds. Unlike voxelization, our proposed technique can take raw point clouds as inputs and outputs a fixed-size TDA-descriptor vector. To test the quality of the proposed TDACloud technique, we have implemented it on multiple real-world (e.g., Oxford RobotCar, KITTI-360) and realistic (e.g., ShapeNet) point cloud datasets for object and place recognition. We have also tested TDACloud on noisy and transformed test cases where the query point cloud has been scaled, translated, or rotated. Our results demonstrate high recognition accuracies in noisy conditions and large-scale real-world place recognition while outperforming the baselines by up to approximately 14%.
Image-based 3D object detection is an inevitable part of autonomous driving because cheap onboard cameras are already available in most modern cars. Because of the accurate depth information, currently, most state-of-the-art 3D object detectors heavily rely on LiDAR data. In this paper, we propose a pipeline which lifts the results of existing vision-based 2D algorithms to 3D detections using only cameras as a cost-effective alternative to LiDAR. In contrast to existing approaches, we focus not only on cars but on all types of road users. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first using a 2D CNN to process the point cloud for each 2D detection to keep the computational effort as low as possible. Our evaluation on the challenging KITTI 3D object detection benchmark shows results comparable to state-of-the-art image-based approaches while having a runtime of only a third.
Diffusion models are advancing autonomous driving by enabling realistic data synthesis, predictive end-to-end planning, and closed-loop simulation, with a primary focus on temporally consistent generation. However, the generation of large-scale 3D scenes that require spatial coherence remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose X-Scene, a novel framework for large-scale driving scene generation that achieves both geometric intricacy and appearance fidelity, while offering flexible controllability. Specifically, X-Scene supports multi-granular control, including low-level conditions such as user-provided or text-driven layout for detailed scene composition and high-level semantic guidance such as user-intent and LLM-enriched text prompts for efficient customization. To enhance geometrical and visual fidelity, we introduce a unified pipeline that sequentially generates 3D semantic occupancy and the corresponding multiview images, while ensuring alignment between modalities. Additionally, we extend the generated local region into a large-scale scene through consistency-aware scene outpainting, which extrapolates new occupancy and images conditioned on the previously generated area, enhancing spatial continuity and preserving visual coherence. The resulting scenes are lifted into high-quality 3DGS representations, supporting diverse applications such as scene exploration. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that X-Scene significantly advances controllability and fidelity for large-scale driving scene generation, empowering data generation and simulation for autonomous driving.
Accurate road topology reasoning is critical for autonomous driving, enabling effective navigation and adherence to traffic regulations. Central to this task are lane perception and topology reasoning. However, existing methods typically focus on either lane detection or Lane-to-Lane (L2L) topology reasoning, often \textit{neglecting} Lane-to-Traffic-element (L2T) relationships or \textit{failing} to optimize these tasks jointly. Furthermore, most approaches either overlook relational modeling or apply it in a limited scope, despite the inherent spatial relationships among road elements. We argue that relational modeling is beneficial for both perception and reasoning, as humans naturally leverage contextual relationships for road element recognition and their connectivity inference. To this end, we introduce relational modeling into both perception and reasoning, \textit{jointly} enhancing structural understanding. Specifically, we propose: 1) a relation-aware lane detector, where our geometry-biased self-attention and \curve\ cross-attention refine lane representations by capturing relational dependencies; 2) relation-enhanced topology heads, including a geometry-enhanced L2L head and a cross-view L2T head, boosting reasoning with relational cues; and 3) a contrastive learning strategy with InfoNCE loss to regularize relationship embeddings. Extensive experiments on OpenLane-V2 demonstrate that our approach significantly improves both detection and topology reasoning metrics, achieving +3.1 in DET$_l$, +5.3 in TOP$_{ll}$, +4.9 in TOP$_{lt}$, and an overall +4.4 in OLS, setting a new state-of-the-art. Code will be released.
World models are critical for autonomous driving to simulate environmental dynamics and generate synthetic data. Existing methods struggle to disentangle ego-vehicle motion (perspective shifts) from scene evolvement (agent interactions), leading to suboptimal predictions. Instead, we propose to separate environmental changes from ego-motion by leveraging the scene-centric coordinate systems. In this paper, we introduce COME: a framework that integrates scene-centric forecasting Control into the Occupancy world ModEl. Specifically, COME first generates ego-irrelevant, spatially consistent future features through a scene-centric prediction branch, which are then converted into scene condition using a tailored ControlNet. These condition features are subsequently injected into the occupancy world model, enabling more accurate and controllable future occupancy predictions. Experimental results on the nuScenes-Occ3D dataset show that COME achieves consistent and significant improvements over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across diverse configurations, including different input sources (ground-truth, camera-based, fusion-based occupancy) and prediction horizons (3s and 8s). For example, under the same settings, COME achieves 26.3% better mIoU metric than DOME and 23.7% better mIoU metric than UniScene. These results highlight the efficacy of disentangled representation learning in enhancing spatio-temporal prediction fidelity for world models. Code and videos will be available at https://github.com/synsin0/COME.
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) for critical tasks such as traffic sign recognition (TSR), automated lane centering (ALC), and vehicle detection (VD). However, these models are vulnerable to attacks that can cause misclassifications and compromise safety. Traditional defense mechanisms, including adversarial training, often degrade benign accuracy and fail to generalize against unseen attacks. In this work, we introduce Vehicle Vision Language Models (V2LMs), fine-tuned vision-language models specialized for AV perception. Our findings demonstrate that V2LMs inherently exhibit superior robustness against unseen attacks without requiring adversarial training, maintaining significantly higher accuracy than conventional DNNs under adversarial conditions. We evaluate two deployment strategies: Solo Mode, where individual V2LMs handle specific perception tasks, and Tandem Mode, where a single unified V2LM is fine-tuned for multiple tasks simultaneously. Experimental results reveal that DNNs suffer performance drops of 33% to 46% under attacks, whereas V2LMs maintain adversarial accuracy with reductions of less than 8% on average. The Tandem Mode further offers a memory-efficient alternative while achieving comparable robustness to Solo Mode. We also explore integrating V2LMs as parallel components to AV perception to enhance resilience against adversarial threats. Our results suggest that V2LMs offer a promising path toward more secure and resilient AV perception systems.
We introduce STSBench, a scenario-based framework to benchmark the holistic understanding of vision-language models (VLMs) for autonomous driving. The framework automatically mines pre-defined traffic scenarios from any dataset using ground-truth annotations, provides an intuitive user interface for efficient human verification, and generates multiple-choice questions for model evaluation. Applied to the NuScenes dataset, we present STSnu, the first benchmark that evaluates the spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities of VLMs based on comprehensive 3D perception. Existing benchmarks typically target off-the-shelf or fine-tuned VLMs for images or videos from a single viewpoint and focus on semantic tasks such as object recognition, dense captioning, risk assessment, or scene understanding. In contrast, STSnu evaluates driving expert VLMs for end-to-end driving, operating on videos from multi-view cameras or LiDAR. It specifically assesses their ability to reason about both ego-vehicle actions and complex interactions among traffic participants, a crucial capability for autonomous vehicles. The benchmark features 43 diverse scenarios spanning multiple views and frames, resulting in 971 human-verified multiple-choice questions. A thorough evaluation uncovers critical shortcomings in existing models' ability to reason about fundamental traffic dynamics in complex environments. These findings highlight the urgent need for architectural advances that explicitly model spatio-temporal reasoning. By addressing a core gap in spatio-temporal evaluation, STSBench enables the development of more robust and explainable VLMs for autonomous driving.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to end-to-end autonomous driving due to their human-like reasoning capabilities. However, troublesome gaps remains between current VLMs and real-world autonomous driving applications. One major limitation is that existing datasets with loosely formatted language descriptions are not machine-friendly and may introduce redundancy. Additionally, high computational cost and massive scale of VLMs hinder the inference speed and real-world deployment. To bridge the gap, this paper introduces a structured and concise benchmark dataset, NuScenes-S, which is derived from the NuScenes dataset and contains machine-friendly structured representations. Moreover, we present FastDrive, a compact VLM baseline with 0.9B parameters. In contrast to existing VLMs with over 7B parameters and unstructured language processing(e.g., LLaVA-1.5), FastDrive understands structured and concise descriptions and generates machine-friendly driving decisions with high efficiency. Extensive experiments show that FastDrive achieves competitive performance on structured dataset, with approximately 20% accuracy improvement on decision-making tasks, while surpassing massive parameter baseline in inference speed with over 10x speedup. Additionally, ablation studies further focus on the impact of scene annotations (e.g., weather, time of day) on decision-making tasks, demonstrating their importance on decision-making tasks in autonomous driving.
With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving, deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance perception and decision-making has become increasingly common. However, the real-time application of VLMs is hindered by high latency and computational overhead, limiting their effectiveness in time-critical driving scenarios. This challenge is particularly evident when VLMs exhibit over-inference, continuing to process unnecessary layers even after confident predictions have been reached. To address this inefficiency, we propose AD-EE, an Early Exit framework that incorporates domain characteristics of autonomous driving and leverages causal inference to identify optimal exit layers. We evaluate our method on large-scale real-world autonomous driving datasets, including Waymo and the corner-case-focused CODA, as well as on a real vehicle running the Autoware Universe platform. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs show that our method significantly reduces latency, with maximum improvements reaching up to 57.58%, and enhances object detection accuracy, with maximum gains of up to 44%.
Autonomous driving requires real-time, robust reasoning across perception, prediction, planning, and behavior. However, conventional end-to-end models fail to generalize in complex scenarios due to the lack of structured reasoning. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have been applied to driving tasks, but they typically rely on isolated modules and static supervision, limiting their ability to support multi-stage decision-making. We present AutoDriveRL, a unified training framework that formulates autonomous driving as a structured reasoning process over four core tasks. Each task is independently modeled as a vision-language question-answering problem and optimized using task-specific reward models, enabling fine-grained reinforcement signals at different reasoning stages. Within this framework, we train DriveRX, a cross-task reasoning VLM designed for real-time decision-making. DriveRX achieves strong performance on a public benchmark, outperforming GPT-4o in behavior reasoning and demonstrating robustness under complex or corrupted driving conditions. Our analysis further highlights the impact of vision encoder design and reward-guided reasoning compression. We will release the AutoDriveRL framework and the DriveRX model to support future research.
Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong capabilities in understanding and analyzing visual scenes across various domains. However, in the context of autonomous driving, their limited comprehension of 3D environments restricts their effectiveness in achieving a complete and safe understanding of dynamic surroundings. To address this, we introduce V3LMA, a novel approach that enhances 3D scene understanding by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with LVLMs. V3LMA leverages textual descriptions generated from object detections and video inputs, significantly boosting performance without requiring fine-tuning. Through a dedicated preprocessing pipeline that extracts 3D object data, our method improves situational awareness and decision-making in complex traffic scenarios, achieving a score of 0.56 on the LingoQA benchmark. We further explore different fusion strategies and token combinations with the goal of advancing the interpretation of traffic scenes, ultimately enabling safer autonomous driving systems.
In this paper, we propose a Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based framework, referred to as Novel View Synthesis Framework (NVSF). It jointly learns the implicit neural representation of space and time-varying scene for both LiDAR and Camera. We test this on a real-world autonomous driving scenario containing both static and dynamic scenes. Compared to existing multimodal dynamic NeRFs, our framework is self-supervised, thus eliminating the need for 3D labels. For efficient training and faster convergence, we introduce heuristic-based image pixel sampling to focus on pixels with rich information. To preserve the local features of LiDAR points, a Double Gradient based mask is employed. Extensive experiments on the KITTI-360 dataset show that, compared to the baseline models, our framework has reported best performance on both LiDAR and Camera domain. Code of the model is available at https://github.com/gaurav00700/Selfsupervised-NVSF