Large-scale scene data is essential for training and testing in robot learning. Neural reconstruction methods have promised the capability of reconstructing large physically-grounded outdoor scenes from captured sensor data. However, these methods have baked-in static environments and only allow for limited scene control -- they are functionally constrained in scene and trajectory diversity by the captures from which they are reconstructed. In contrast, generating driving data with recent image or video diffusion models offers control, however, at the cost of geometry grounding and causality. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap and present a method that directly generates large-scale 3D driving scenes with accurate geometry, allowing for causal novel view synthesis with object permanence and explicit 3D geometry estimation. The proposed method combines the generation of a proxy geometry and environment representation with score distillation from learned 2D image priors. We find that this approach allows for high controllability, enabling the prompt-guided geometry and high-fidelity texture and structure that can be conditioned on map layouts -- producing realistic and geometrically consistent 3D generations of complex driving scenes.

Computer vision in unconstrained outdoor scenarios must tackle challenging high dynamic range (HDR) scenes and rapidly changing illumination conditions. Existing methods address this problem with multi-capture HDR sensors and a hardware image signal processor (ISP) that produces a single fused image as input to a downstream neural network. The output of the HDR sensor is a set of low dy-namic range (LDR) exposures, and the fusion in the ISP is performed in image space and typically optimized for hu-man perception on a display. Preferring tonemapped content with smooth transition regions over detail (and noise) in the resulting image, this image fusion does typically not preserve all information from the LDR exposures that may be essential for downstream computer vision tasks. In this work, we depart from conventional HDR image fusion and propose a learned task-driven fusion in the feature domain. Instead of using a single companded image, we introduce a novel local cross-attention fusion mechanism that exploits semantic features from all exposures learned in an end-to-end fashion with supervision from downstream detection losses. The proposed method outperforms all tested conventional HDR exposure fusion and auto-exposure methods in challenging automotive HDR scenarios.