Extracting lane topology from perspective views (PV) is crucial for planning and control in autonomous driving. This approach extracts potential drivable trajectories for self-driving vehicles without relying on high-definition (HD) maps. However, the unordered nature and weak long-range perception of the DETR-like framework can result in misaligned segment endpoints and limited topological prediction capabilities. Inspired by the learning of contextual relationships in language models, the connectivity relations in roads can be characterized as explicit topology sequences. In this paper, we introduce Topo2Seq, a novel approach for enhancing topology reasoning via topology sequences learning. The core concept of Topo2Seq is a randomized order prompt-to-sequence learning between lane segment decoder and topology sequence decoder. The dual-decoder branches simultaneously learn the lane topology sequences extracted from the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and the lane graph containing geometric information. Randomized order prompt-to-sequence learning extracts unordered key points from the lane graph predicted by the lane segment decoder, which are then fed into the prompt design of the topology sequence decoder to reconstruct an ordered and complete lane graph. In this way, the lane segment decoder learns powerful long-range perception and accurate topological reasoning from the topology sequence decoder. Notably, topology sequence decoder is only introduced during training and does not affect the inference efficiency. Experimental evaluations on the OpenLane-V2 dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Topo2Seq in topology reasoning.

Vision-language generative AI has demonstrated re-markable promise for empowering cross-modal scene understanding of autonomous driving and high-definition (HD) map systems. However, current benchmark datasets lack multi-modal point cloud, image, and language data pairs. Recent approaches utilize visual instruction learning and cross-modal prompt engineering to expand vision-language models into this domain. In this paper, we pro-pose a new vision-language benchmark that can be used to finetune traffic and HD map domain-specific foundation models. Specifically, we annotate and leverage large-scale, broad-coverage traffic and map data extracted from huge HD map annotations, and use CLIP and LLaMA-2 / Vi-cuna to finetune a baseline model with instruction-following data. Our experimental results across various algorithms reveal that while visual instruction-tuning large language models (LLMs) can effectively learn meaningful represen-tations from MAPLM-QA, there remains significant room for further advancements. To facilitate applying LLMs and multi-modal data into self-driving research, we will release our visual-language QA data, and the baseline models at GitHub.com/LLVM-AD/MAPLM.

As one of the basic while vital technologies for HD map construction, 3D lane detection is still an open problem due to varying visual conditions, complex typologies, and strict demands for precision. In this paper, an end-to-end flexible and hierarchical lane detector is proposed to precisely predict 3D lane lines from point clouds. Specifically, we design a hierarchical network predicting flexible representations of lane shapes at different levels, simultaneously collecting global instance semantics and avoiding local errors. In the global scope, we propose to regress parametric curves w.r.t adaptive axes that help to make more robust predictions towards complex scenes, while in the local vision the structure of lane segment is detected in each of the dynamic anchor cells sampled along the global predicted curves. Moreover, corresponding global and local shape matching losses and anchor cell generation strategies are designed. Experiments on two datasets show that we overwhelm current top methods under high precision standards, and full ablation studies also verify each part of our method. Our codes will be released at https://github.com/Doo-do/FHLD.

Nowadays, autonomous vehicle technology is becoming more and more mature. Critical to progress and safety, high-definition (HD) maps, a type of centimeter-level map collected using a laser sensor, provide accurate descriptions of the surrounding environment. The key challenge of HD map production is efficient, high-quality collection and annotation of large-volume datasets. Due to the demand for high quality, HD map production requires significant manual human effort to create annotations, a very time-consuming and costly process for the map industry. In order to reduce manual annotation burdens, many artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have been developed to pre-label the HD maps. However, there still exists a large gap between AI algorithms and the traditional manual HD map production pipelines in accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, it is also very resource-costly to build large-scale annotated datasets and advanced machine learning algorithms for AI-based HD map automatic labeling systems. In this paper, we introduce the Tencent HD Map AI (THMA) system, an innovative end-to-end, AI-based, active learning HD map labeling system capable of producing and labeling HD maps with a scale of hundreds of thousands of kilometers. In THMA, we train AI models directly from massive HD map datasets via supervised, self-supervised, and weakly supervised learning to achieve high accuracy and efficiency required by downstream users. THMA has been deployed by the Tencent Map team to provide services to downstream companies and users, serving over 1,000 labeling workers and producing more than 30,000 kilometers of HD map data per day at most. More than 90 percent of the HD map data in Tencent Map is labeled automatically by THMA, accelerating the traditional HD map labeling process by more than ten times.

3D lane detection from monocular images is a fundamental yet challenging task in autonomous driving. Recent advances primarily rely on structural 3D surrogates (e.g., bird’s eye view) built from front-view image features and camera parameters. However, the depth ambiguity in monocular images inevitably causes misalignment between the constructed surrogate feature map and the original image, posing a great challenge for accurate lane detection. To address the above issue, we present a novel LATR model, an end-to-end 3D lane detector that uses 3D-aware front-view features without transformed view representation. Specifically, LATR detects 3D lanes via cross-attention based on query and key-value pairs, constructed using our lane-aware query generator and dynamic 3D ground positional embedding. On the one hand, each query is generated based on 2D lane-aware features and adopts a hybrid embedding to enhance the lane information. On the other hand, 3D space information is injected as positional embedding from an iteratively-updated 3D ground plane. LATR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic Apollo and realistic OpenLane and ONCE-3DLanes by large margins (e.g., 11.4 gain in terms of F1 score on OpenLane). Code will be released at https://github.com/JMoonr/LATR.

3D lane detection based on LiDAR point clouds is a challenging task that requires precise locations, accurate topologies, and distinguishable instances. In this paper, we propose a dual-level shape attention network (DSANet) with two branches for high-precision 3D lane predictions. Specifically, one branch predicts the refined lane segment shapes and the shape embeddings that encode the approximate lane instance shapes, the other branch detects the coarse-grained structures of the lane instances. In the training stage, two-level shape matching loss functions are introduced to jointly optimize the shape parameters of the twobranch outputs, which are simple yet effective for precision enhancement. Furthermore, a shape-guided segments aggregator is proposed to help local lane segments aggregate into complete lane instances, according to the differences of instance shapes predicted at different levels. Experiments conducted on our BEV-3DLanes dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods.