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Unified End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving
May 07, 2024
V2X cooperation, through the integration of sensor data from both vehicles and infrastructure, is considered a pivotal approach to advancing autonomous driving technology. Current research primarily focuses on enhancing perception accuracy, often overlooking the systematic improvement of accident prediction accuracy through end-to-end learning, leading to insufficient attention to the safety issues of autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the UniE2EV2X framework, a V2X-integrated end-to-end autonomous driving system that consolidates key driving modules within a unified network. The framework employs a deformable attention-based data fusion strategy, effectively facilitating cooperation between vehicles and infrastructure. The main advantages include: 1) significantly enhancing agents' perception and motion prediction capabilities, thereby improving the accuracy of accident predictions; 2) ensuring high reliability in the data fusion process; 3) superior end-to-end perception compared to modular approaches. Furthermore, We implement the UniE2EV2X framework on the challenging DeepAccident, a simulation dataset designed for V2X cooperative driving.
Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning
May 01, 2024Decentralized Multi-agent Learning (DML) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, inherent heterogeneity in agents' resources (computation, communication, and task size) may lead to substantial variations in training time. This heterogeneity creates a bottleneck, lengthening the overall training time due to straggler effects and potentially wasting spare resources of faster agents. To minimize training time in heterogeneous environments, we present a Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning (ComDML), which balances the workload among agents through a decentralized approach. Leveraging local-loss split training, ComDML enables parallel updates, where slower agents offload part of their workload to faster agents. To minimize the overall training time, ComDML optimizes the workload balancing by jointly considering the communication and computation capacities of agents, which hinges upon integer programming. A dynamic decentralized pairing scheduler is developed to efficiently pair agents and determine optimal offloading amounts. We prove that in ComDML, both slower and faster agents' models converge, for convex and non-convex functions. Furthermore, extensive experimental results on popular datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10) and their non-I.I.D. variants, with large models such as ResNet-56 and ResNet-110, demonstrate that ComDML can significantly reduce the overall training time while maintaining model accuracy, compared to state-of-the-art methods. ComDML demonstrates robustness in heterogeneous environments, and privacy measures can be seamlessly integrated for enhanced data protection.
RoadBEV: Road Surface Reconstruction in Bird's Eye View
Apr 09, 2024Road surface conditions, especially geometry profiles, enormously affect driving performance of autonomous vehicles. Vision-based online road reconstruction promisingly captures road information in advance. Existing solutions like monocular depth estimation and stereo matching suffer from modest performance. The recent technique of Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception provides immense potential to more reliable and accurate reconstruction. This paper uniformly proposes two simple yet effective models for road elevation reconstruction in BEV named RoadBEV-mono and RoadBEV-stereo, which estimate road elevation with monocular and stereo images, respectively. The former directly fits elevation values based on voxel features queried from image view, while the latter efficiently recognizes road elevation patterns based on BEV volume representing discrepancy between left and right voxel features. Insightful analyses reveal their consistence and difference with perspective view. Experiments on real-world dataset verify the models' effectiveness and superiority. Elevation errors of RoadBEV-mono and RoadBEV-stereo achieve 1.83cm and 0.56cm, respectively. The estimation performance improves by 50\% in BEV based on monocular image. Our models are promising for practical applications, providing valuable references for vision-based BEV perception in autonomous driving. The code is released at https://github.com/ztsrxh/RoadBEV.
Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation
Apr 01, 2024Human motion generation, a cornerstone technique in animation and video production, has widespread applications in various tasks like text-to-motion and music-to-dance. Previous works focus on developing specialist models tailored for each task without scalability. In this work, we present Large Motion Model (LMM), a motion-centric, multi-modal framework that unifies mainstream motion generation tasks into a generalist model. A unified motion model is appealing since it can leverage a wide range of motion data to achieve broad generalization beyond a single task. However, it is also challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of substantially different motion data and tasks. LMM tackles these challenges from three principled aspects: 1) Data: We consolidate datasets with different modalities, formats and tasks into a comprehensive yet unified motion generation dataset, MotionVerse, comprising 10 tasks, 16 datasets, a total of 320k sequences, and 100 million frames. 2) Architecture: We design an articulated attention mechanism ArtAttention that incorporates body part-aware modeling into Diffusion Transformer backbone. 3) Pre-Training: We propose a novel pre-training strategy for LMM, which employs variable frame rates and masking forms, to better exploit knowledge from diverse training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our generalist LMM achieves competitive performance across various standard motion generation tasks over state-of-the-art specialist models. Notably, LMM exhibits strong generalization capabilities and emerging properties across many unseen tasks. Additionally, our ablation studies reveal valuable insights about training and scaling up large motion models for future research.
Duolando: Follower GPT with Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Dance Accompaniment
Mar 27, 2024
We introduce a novel task within the field of 3D dance generation, termed dance accompaniment, which necessitates the generation of responsive movements from a dance partner, the "follower", synchronized with the lead dancer's movements and the underlying musical rhythm. Unlike existing solo or group dance generation tasks, a duet dance scenario entails a heightened degree of interaction between the two participants, requiring delicate coordination in both pose and position. To support this task, we first build a large-scale and diverse duet interactive dance dataset, DD100, by recording about 117 minutes of professional dancers' performances. To address the challenges inherent in this task, we propose a GPT-based model, Duolando, which autoregressively predicts the subsequent tokenized motion conditioned on the coordinated information of the music, the leader's and the follower's movements. To further enhance the GPT's capabilities of generating stable results on unseen conditions (music and leader motions), we devise an off-policy reinforcement learning strategy that allows the model to explore viable trajectories from out-of-distribution samplings, guided by human-defined rewards. Based on the collected dataset and proposed method, we establish a benchmark with several carefully designed metrics.
AiOS: All-in-One-Stage Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation
Mar 26, 2024
Expressive human pose and shape estimation (a.k.a. 3D whole-body mesh recovery) involves the human body, hand, and expression estimation. Most existing methods have tackled this task in a two-stage manner, first detecting the human body part with an off-the-shelf detection model and inferring the different human body parts individually. Despite the impressive results achieved, these methods suffer from 1) loss of valuable contextual information via cropping, 2) introducing distractions, and 3) lacking inter-association among different persons and body parts, inevitably causing performance degradation, especially for crowded scenes. To address these issues, we introduce a novel all-in-one-stage framework, AiOS, for multiple expressive human pose and shape recovery without an additional human detection step. Specifically, our method is built upon DETR, which treats multi-person whole-body mesh recovery task as a progressive set prediction problem with various sequential detection. We devise the decoder tokens and extend them to our task. Specifically, we first employ a human token to probe a human location in the image and encode global features for each instance, which provides a coarse location for the later transformer block. Then, we introduce a joint-related token to probe the human joint in the image and encoder a fine-grained local feature, which collaborates with the global feature to regress the whole-body mesh. This straightforward but effective model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a 9% reduction in NMVE on AGORA, a 30% reduction in PVE on EHF, a 10% reduction in PVE on ARCTIC, and a 3% reduction in PVE on EgoBody.
WHAC: World-grounded Humans and Cameras
Mar 19, 2024
Estimating human and camera trajectories with accurate scale in the world coordinate system from a monocular video is a highly desirable yet challenging and ill-posed problem. In this study, we aim to recover expressive parametric human models (i.e., SMPL-X) and corresponding camera poses jointly, by leveraging the synergy between three critical players: the world, the human, and the camera. Our approach is founded on two key observations. Firstly, camera-frame SMPL-X estimation methods readily recover absolute human depth. Secondly, human motions inherently provide absolute spatial cues. By integrating these insights, we introduce a novel framework, referred to as WHAC, to facilitate world-grounded expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) alongside camera pose estimation, without relying on traditional optimization techniques. Additionally, we present a new synthetic dataset, WHAC-A-Mole, which includes accurately annotated humans and cameras, and features diverse interactive human motions as well as realistic camera trajectories. Extensive experiments on both standard and newly established benchmarks highlight the superiority and efficacy of our framework. We will make the code and dataset publicly available.
GraphBEV: Towards Robust BEV Feature Alignment for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection
Mar 18, 2024
Integrating LiDAR and camera information into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a crucial aspect of 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are susceptible to the inaccurate calibration relationship between LiDAR and the camera sensor. Such inaccuracies result in errors in depth estimation for the camera branch, ultimately causing misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. In this work, we propose a robust fusion framework called Graph BEV. Addressing errors caused by inaccurate point cloud projection, we introduce a Local Align module that employs neighbor-aware depth features via Graph matching. Additionally, we propose a Global Align module to rectify the misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. Our Graph BEV framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP of 70.1\%, surpassing BEV Fusion by 1.6\% on the nuscenes validation set. Importantly, our Graph BEV outperforms BEV Fusion by 8.3\% under conditions with misalignment noise.
Den-SOFT: Dense Space-Oriented Light Field DataseT for 6-DOF Immersive Experience
Mar 15, 2024
We have built a custom mobile multi-camera large-space dense light field capture system, which provides a series of high-quality and sufficiently dense light field images for various scenarios. Our aim is to contribute to the development of popular 3D scene reconstruction algorithms such as IBRnet, NeRF, and 3D Gaussian splitting. More importantly, the collected dataset, which is much denser than existing datasets, may also inspire space-oriented light field reconstruction, which is potentially different from object-centric 3D reconstruction, for immersive VR/AR experiences. We utilized a total of 40 GoPro 10 cameras, capturing images of 5k resolution. The number of photos captured for each scene is no less than 1000, and the average density (view number within a unit sphere) is 134.68. It is also worth noting that our system is capable of efficiently capturing large outdoor scenes. Addressing the current lack of large-space and dense light field datasets, we made efforts to include elements such as sky, reflections, lights and shadows that are of interest to researchers in the field of 3D reconstruction during the data capture process. Finally, we validated the effectiveness of our provided dataset on three popular algorithms and also integrated the reconstructed 3DGS results into the Unity engine, demonstrating the potential of utilizing our datasets to enhance the realism of virtual reality (VR) and create feasible interactive spaces. The dataset is available at our project website.
Neuromorphic Synergy for Video Binarization
Feb 20, 2024Bimodal objects, such as the checkerboard pattern used in camera calibration, markers for object tracking, and text on road signs, to name a few, are prevalent in our daily lives and serve as a visual form to embed information that can be easily recognized by vision systems. While binarization from intensity images is crucial for extracting the embedded information in the bimodal objects, few previous works consider the task of binarization of blurry images due to the relative motion between the vision sensor and the environment. The blurry images can result in a loss in the binarization quality and thus degrade the downstream applications where the vision system is in motion. Recently, neuromorphic cameras offer new capabilities for alleviating motion blur, but it is non-trivial to first deblur and then binarize the images in a real-time manner. In this work, we propose an event-based binary reconstruction method that leverages the prior knowledge of the bimodal target's properties to perform inference independently in both event space and image space and merge the results from both domains to generate a sharp binary image. We also develop an efficient integration method to propagate this binary image to high frame rate binary video. Finally, we develop a novel method to naturally fuse events and images for unsupervised threshold identification. The proposed method is evaluated in publicly available and our collected data sequence, and shows the proposed method can outperform the SOTA methods to generate high frame rate binary video in real-time on CPU-only devices.