Accurate 3D object detection in real-world environments requires a huge amount of annotated data with high quality. Acquiring such data is tedious and expensive, and often needs repeated effort when a new sensor is adopted or when the detector is deployed in a new environment. We investigate a new scenario to construct 3D object detectors: *learning from the predictions of a nearby unit that is equipped with an accurate detector.* For example, when a self-driving car enters a new area, it may learn from other traffic participants whose detectors have been optimized for that area. This setting is label-efficient, sensor-agnostic, and communication-efficient: nearby units only need to share the predictions with the ego agent (e.g., car). Naively using the received predictions as ground-truths to train the detector for the ego car, however, leads to inferior performance. We systematically study the problem and identify viewpoint mismatches and mislocalization (due to synchronization and GPS errors) as the main causes, which unavoidably result in false positives, false negatives, and inaccurate pseudo labels. We propose a distance-based curriculum, first learning from closer units with similar viewpoints and subsequently improving the quality of other units' predictions via self-training. We further demonstrate that an effective pseudo label refinement module can be trained with a handful of annotated data, largely reducing the data quantity necessary to train an object detector. We validate our approach on the recently released real-world collaborative driving dataset, using reference cars' predictions as pseudo labels for the ego car. Extensive experiments including several scenarios (e.g., different sensors, detectors, and domains) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach toward label-efficient learning of 3D perception from other units' predictions.

Ensuring robust 3D object detection and localization is crucial for many applications in robotics and autonomous driving. Recent models, however, face difficulties in maintaining high performance when applied to domains with differing sensor setups or geographic locations, often resulting in poor localization accuracy due to domain shift. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel diffusion-based box refinement approach. This method employs a domain-agnostic diffusion model, conditioned on the LiDAR points surrounding a coarse bounding box, to simultaneously refine the box's location, size, and orientation. We evaluate this approach under various domain adaptation settings, and our results reveal significant improvements across different datasets, object classes and detectors. Our PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/cxy1997/DiffuBox.

Simulation is an essential tool to develop and benchmark autonomous vehicle planning software in a safe and cost-effective manner. However, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of multi-agent interactive behaviors to be trustworthy, behaviors which can be highly nuanced and complex. To address these challenges, we introduce Waymax, a new data-driven simulator for autonomous driving in multi-agent scenes, designed for large-scale simulation and testing. Waymax uses publicly-released, real-world driving data (e.g., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset) to initialize or play back a diverse set of multi-agent simulated scenarios. It runs entirely on hardware accelerators such as TPUs/GPUs and supports in-graph simulation for training, making it suitable for modern large-scale, distributed machine learning workflows. To support online training and evaluation, Waymax includes several learned and hard-coded behavior models that allow for realistic interaction within simulation. To supplement Waymax, we benchmark a suite of popular imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms with ablation studies on different design decisions, where we highlight the effectiveness of routes as guidance for planning agents and the ability of RL to overfit against simulated agents.

Recent advances in machine learning have shown that Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can improve machine learning models and align them with human preferences. Although very successful for Large Language Models (LLMs), these advancements have not had a comparable impact in research for autonomous vehicles—where alignment with human expectations can be imperative. In this paper, we propose to adapt similar RL-based methods to unsupervised object discovery, i.e. learning to detect objects from LiDAR points without any training labels. Instead of labels, we use simple heuristics to mimic human feedback. More explicitly, we combine multiple heuristics into a simple reward function that positively correlates its score with bounding box accuracy, i.e., boxes containing objects are scored higher than those without. We start from the detector’s own predictions to explore the space and reinforce boxes with high rewards through gradient updates. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach is not only more accurate, but also orders of magnitudes faster to train compared to prior works on object discovery. Code is available at https://github.com/katieluo88/DRIFT.

Gradient inversion attack enables recovery of training samples from model gradients in federated learning (FL), and constitutes a serious threat to data privacy. To mitigate this vulnerability, prior work proposed both principled defenses based on differential privacy, as well as heuristic defenses based on gradient compression as countermeasures. These defenses have so far been very effective, in particular those based on gradient compression that allow the model to maintain high accuracy while greatly reducing the effectiveness of attacks. In this work, we argue that such findings underestimate the privacy risk in FL. As a counterexample, we show that existing defenses can be broken by a simple adaptive attack, where a model trained on auxiliary data is able to invert gradients on both vision and language tasks.

Advances in perception for self-driving cars have accelerated in recent years due to the availability of large-scale datasets, typically collected at specific locations and under nice weather conditions. Yet, to achieve the high safety requirement, these perceptual systems must operate robustly under a wide variety of weather conditions including snow and rain. In this paper, we present a new dataset to enable robust autonomous driving via a novel data collection process - data is repeatedly recorded along a 15 km route under diverse scene (urban, highway, rural, campus), weather (snow, rain, sun), time (day/night), and traffic conditions (pedestrians, cyclists and cars). The dataset includes images and point clouds from cameras and LiDAR sensors, along with high-precision GPS/INS to establish correspondence across routes. The dataset includes road and object annotations using amodal masks to capture partial occlusions and 3D bounding boxes. We demonstrate the uniqueness of this dataset by analyzing the performance of baselines in amodal segmentation of road and objects, depth estimation, and 3D object detection. The repeated routes opens new research directions in object discovery, continual learning, and anomaly detection. Link to Ithaca365: https://ithaca365.mae.cornell.edu/

Low-precision training has become a popular approach to reduce compute requirements, memory footprint, and energy consumption in supervised learning. In contrast, this promising approach has not yet enjoyed similarly widespread adoption within the reinforcement learning (RL) community, partly because RL agents can be notoriously hard to train even in full precision. In this paper we consider continuous control with the state-of-the-art SAC agent and demonstrate that a naïve adaptation of low-precision methods from supervised learning fails. We propose a set of six modifications, all straightforward to implement, that leaves the underlying agent and its hyperparameters unchanged but improves the numerical stability dramatically. The resulting modified SAC agent has lower memory and compute requirements while matching full-precision rewards, demonstrating that low-precision training can substantially accelerate state-of-the-art RL without parameter tuning.

In the domain of autonomous driving, deep learning has substantially improved the 3D object detection accuracy for LiDAR and stereo camera data alike. While deep networks are great at generalization, they are also notorious to overfit to all kinds of spurious artifacts, such as brightness, car sizes and models, that may appear consistently throughout the data. In fact, most datasets for autonomous driving are collected within a narrow subset of cities within one country, typically under similar weather conditions. In this paper we consider the task of adapting 3D object detectors from one dataset to another. We observe that naively, this appears to be a very challenging task, resulting in drastic drops in accuracy levels. We provide extensive experiments to investigate the true adaptation challenges and arrive at a surprising conclusion: the primary adaptation hurdle to overcome are differences in car sizes across geographic areas. A simple correction based on the average car size yields a strong correction of the adaptation gap. Our proposed method is simple and easily incorporated into most 3D object detection frameworks. It provides a first baseline for 3D object detection adaptation across countries, and gives hope that the underlying problem may be more within grasp than one may have hoped to believe. Our code is available at https://github. com/cxy1997/3D_adapt_auto_driving.