How can we benefit from large models without sacrificing inference speed, a common dilemma in self-driving systems? A prevalent solution is a dual-system architecture, employing a small model for rapid, reactive decisions and a larger model for slower but more informative analyses. Existing dual-system designs often implement parallel architectures where inference is either directly conducted using the large model at each current frame or retrieved from previously stored inference results. However, these works still struggle to enable large models for a timely response to every online frame. Our key insight is to shift intensive computations of the current frame to previous time steps and perform a batch inference of multiple time steps to make large models respond promptly to each time step. To achieve the shifting, we introduce Efficiency through Thinking Ahead (ETA), an asynchronous system designed to: (1) propagate informative features from the past to the current frame using future predictions from the large model, (2) extract current frame features using a small model for real-time responsiveness, and (3) integrate these dual features via an action mask mechanism that emphasizes action-critical image regions. Evaluated on the Bench2Drive CARLA Leaderboard-v2 benchmark, ETA advances state-of-the-art performance by 8% with a driving score of 69.53 while maintaining a near-real-time inference speed at 50 ms.

Self-supervised learning allows AI systems to learn effective representations from large amounts of data using tasks that do not require costly labeling. Mode collapse, i.e., the model producing identical representations for all inputs, is a central problem to many self-supervised learning approaches, making self-supervised tasks, such as matching distorted variants of the inputs, ineffective. In this article, we argue that a straightforward application of information maximization among alternative latent representations of the same input naturally solves the collapse problem and achieves competitive empirical results. We propose a self-supervised learning method, CorInfoMax, that uses a second-order statistics-based mutual information measure that reflects the level of correlation among its arguments. Maximizing this correlative information measure between alternative representations of the same input serves two purposes: (1) it avoids the collapse problem by generating feature vectors with non-degenerate covariances; (2) it establishes relevance among alternative representations by increasing the linear dependence among them. An approximation of the proposed information maximization objective simplifies to a Euclidean distance-based objective function regularized by the log-determinant of the feature covariance matrix. The regularization term acts as a natural barrier against feature space degeneracy. Consequently, beyond avoiding complete output collapse to a single point, the proposed approach also prevents dimensional collapse by encouraging the spread of information across the whole feature space. Numerical experiments demonstrate that CorInfoMax achieves better or competitive performance results relative to the state-of-the-art SSL approaches.