Self-supervised pre-training based on next-token prediction has enabled large language models to capture the underlying structure of text, and has led to unprecedented performance on a large array of tasks when applied at scale. Similarly, autonomous driving generates vast amounts of spatiotemporal data, alluding to the possibility of harnessing scale to learn the underlying geometric and semantic structure of the environment and its evolution over time. In this direction, we propose a geometric and semantic self-supervised pre-training method, GASP, that learns a unified representation by predicting, at any queried future point in spacetime, (1) general occupancy, capturing the evolving structure of the 3D scene; (2) ego occupancy, modeling the ego vehicle path through the environment; and (3) distilled high-level features from a vision foundation model. By modeling geometric and semantic 4D occupancy fields instead of raw sensor measurements, the model learns a structured, generalizable representation of the environment and its evolution through time. We validate GASP on multiple autonomous driving benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements in semantic occupancy forecasting, online mapping, and ego trajectory prediction. Our results demonstrate that continuous 4D geometric and semantic occupancy prediction provides a scalable and effective pre-training paradigm for autonomous driving. For code and additional visualizations, see our project page.

The task of online mapping is to predict a local map using current sensor observations, e.g. from lidar and camera, without relying on a pre-built map. State-of-the-art methods are based on supervised learning and are trained predominantly using two datasets: nuScenes and Argoverse 2. However, these datasets revisit the same geographic locations across training, validation, and test sets. Specifically, over 80% of nuScenes and 40% of Argoverse 2 validation and test samples are less than 5 m from a training sample. At test time, the methods are thus evaluated more on how well they localize within a memorized implicit map built from the training data than on extrapolating to unseen locations. Naturally, this data leakage causes inflated performance numbers and we propose geographically disjoint data splits to reveal the true performance in unseen environments. Experimental results show that methods perform considerably worse, some dropping more than 45 mAp, when trained and evaluated on proper data splits. Additionally, a reassessment of prior design choices reveals diverging conclusions from those based on the original split. Notably, the impact of lifting methods and the support from auxiliary tasks (e.g., depth supervision) on performance appears less substantial or follows a different trajectory than previously perceived. https://github.com/LiljaAdam/geographical-splits

Existing datasets for autonomous driving (AD) often lack diversity and long-range capabilities, focusing instead on 360° perception and temporal reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD), a large- scale and diverse multimodal dataset collected over two years in various European countries, covering an area 9×that of existing datasets. ZOD boasts the highest range and resolution sensors among comparable datasets, coupled with detailed keyframe annotations for 2D and 3D objects (up to 245m), road instance/semantic segmentation, traffic sign recognition, and road classification. We believe that this unique combination will facilitate breakthroughs in long-range perception and multi-task learning. The dataset is composed of Frames, Sequences, and Drives, designed to encompass both data diversity and support for spatio-temporal learning, sensor fusion, localization, and mapping. Frames consist of 100k curated camera images with two seconds of other supporting sensor data, while the 1473 Sequences and 29 Drives include the entire sensor suite for 20 seconds and a few minutes, respectively. ZOD is the only large-scale AD dataset released under a permissive license, allowing for both research and commercial use. More information, and an extensive devkit, can be found at zod.zenseact.com.