Human drivers have a remarkable ability to drive in diverse visual conditions and situations, e.g., from maneuvering in rainy, limited visibility conditions with no lane markings to turning in a busy intersection while yielding to pedestrians. In contrast, we find that state-of-the-art sensorimotor driving models struggle when encountering diverse settings with varying relationships between observation and action. To generalize when making decisions across diverse conditions, humans leverage multiple types of situation-specific reasoning and learning strategies. Motivated by this observation, we develop a framework for learning a situational driving policy that effectively captures reasoning under varying types of scenarios. Our key idea is to learn a mixture model with a set of policies that can capture multiple driving modes. We first optimize the mixture model through behavior cloning and show it to result in significant gains in terms of driving performance in diverse conditions. We then refine the model by directly optimizing for the driving task itself, i.e., supervised with the navigation task reward. Our method is more scalable than methods assuming access to privileged information, e.g., perception labels, as it only assumes demonstration and reward-based supervision. We achieve over 98% success rate on the CARLA driving benchmark as well as state-of-the-art performance on a newly introduced generalization benchmark.

Data aggregation techniques can significantly improve vision-based policy learning within a training environment, e.g., learning to drive in a specific simulation condition. However, as on-policy data is sequentially sampled and added in an iterative manner, the policy can specialize and overfit to the training conditions. For real-world applications, it is useful for the learned policy to generalize to novel scenarios that differ from the training conditions. To improve policy learning while maintaining robustness when training end-to-end driving policies, we perform an extensive analysis of data aggregation techniques in the CARLA environment. We demonstrate how the majority of them have poor generalization performance, and develop a novel approach with empirically better generalization performance compared to existing techniques. Our two key ideas are (1) to sample critical states from the collected on-policy data based on the utility they provide to the learned policy in terms of driving behavior, and (2) to incorporate a replay buffer which progressively focuses on the high uncertainty regions of the policy's state distribution. We evaluate the proposed approach on the CARLA NoCrash benchmark, focusing on the most challenging driving scenarios with dense pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Our approach improves driving success rate by 16% over state-of-the-art, achieving 87% of the expert performance while also reducing the collision rate by an order of magnitude without the use of any additional modality, auxiliary tasks, architectural modifications or reward from the environment.

It is well known that semantic segmentation can be used as an effective intermediate representation for learning driving policies. However, the task of street scene semantic segmentation requires expensive annotations. Furthermore, segmentation algorithms are often trained irrespective of the actual driving task, using auxiliary image-space loss functions which are not guaranteed to maximize driving metrics such as safety or distance traveled per intervention. In this work, we seek to quantify the impact of reducing segmentation annotation costs on learned behavior cloning agents. We analyze several segmentation-based intermediate representations. We use these visual abstractions to systematically study the trade-off between annotation efficiency and driving performance, i.e., the types of classes labeled, the number of image samples used to learn the visual abstraction model, and their granularity (e.g., object masks vs. 2D bounding boxes). Our analysis uncovers several practical insights into how segmentation-based visual abstractions can be exploited in a more label efficient manner. Surprisingly, we find that state-of-the-art driving performance can be achieved with orders of magnitude reduction in annotation cost. Beyond label efficiency, we find several additional training benefits when leveraging visual abstractions, such as a significant reduction in the variance of the learned policy when compared to state-of-the-art end-to-end driving models.

Despite significant progress in image-based 3D scene flow estimation, the performance of such approaches has not yet reached the fidelity required by many applications. Simultaneously, these applications are often not restricted to image-based estimation: laser scanners provide a popular alternative to traditional cameras, for example in the context of self-driving cars, as they directly yield a 3D point cloud. In this paper, we propose to estimate 3D motion from such unstructured point clouds using a deep neural network. In a single forward pass, our model jointly predicts 3D scene flow as well as the 3D bounding box and rigid body motion of objects in the scene. While the prospect of estimating 3D scene flow from unstructured point clouds is promising, it is also a challenging task. We show that the traditional global representation of rigid body motion prohibits inference by CNNs, and propose a translation equivariant representation to circumvent this problem. For training our deep network, a large dataset is required. Because of this, we augment real scans from KITTI with virtual objects, realistically modeling occlusions and simulating sensor noise. A thorough comparison with classic and learning-based techniques highlights the robustness of the proposed approach.

Existing methods for 3D scene flow estimation often fail in the presence of large displacement or local ambiguities, e.g., at texture-less or reflective surfaces. However, these challenges are omnipresent in dynamic road scenes, which is the focus of this work. Our main contribution is to overcome these 3D motion estimation problems by exploiting recognition. In particular, we investigate the importance of recognition granularity, from coarse 2D bounding box estimates over 2D instance segmentations to fine-grained 3D object part predictions. We compute these cues using CNNs trained on a newly annotated dataset of stereo images and integrate them into a CRF-based model for robust 3D scene flow estimation - an approach we term Instance Scene Flow. We analyze the importance of each recognition cue in an ablation study and observe that the instance segmentation cue is by far strongest, in our setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the challenging KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark where we achieve state-of-the-art performance at the time of submission.

Many tasks in computer vision, such as action classification and object detection, require us to rank a set of samples according to their relevance to a particular visual category. The performance of such tasks is often measured in terms of the average precision (AP). Yet it is common practice to employ the support vector machine (SVM) classifier, which optimizes a surrogate 0-1 loss. The popularity of SVM can be attributed to its empirical performance. Specifically, in fully supervised settings, SVM tends to provide similar accuracy to AP-SVM, which directly optimizes an AP-based loss. However, we hypothesize that in the significantly more challenging and practically useful setting of weakly supervised learning, it becomes crucial to optimize the right accuracy measure. In order to test this hypothesis, we propose a novel latent AP-SVM that minimizes a carefully designed upper bound on the AP-based loss function over weakly supervised samples. Using publicly available datasets, we demonstrate the advantage of our approach over standard loss-based learning frameworks on three challenging problems: action classification, character recognition and object detection.

Many tasks in computer vision, such as action classification and object detection, require us to rank a set of samples according to their relevance to a particular visual category. The performance of such tasks is often measured in terms of the average precision (ap). Yet it is common practice to employ the support vector machine ( svm) classifier, which optimizes a surrogate 0-1 loss. The popularity of svmcan be attributed to its empirical performance. Specifically, in fully supervised settings, svm tends to provide similar accuracy to ap-svm, which directly optimizes an ap-based loss. However, we hypothesize that in the significantly more challenging and practically useful setting of weakly supervised learning, it becomes crucial to optimize the right accuracy measure. In order to test this hypothesis, we propose a novel latent ap-svm that minimizes a carefully designed upper bound on the ap-based loss function over weakly supervised samples. Using publicly available datasets, we demonstrate the advantage of our approach over standard loss-based learning frameworks on three challenging problems: action classification, character recognition and object detection.