Advances in machine learning methods for computer vision tasks have led to their consideration for safety-critical applications like autonomous driving. However, effectively integrating these methods into the automotive development lifecycle remains challenging. Since the performance of machine learning algorithms relies heavily on the training data provided, the data and model development lifecycle play a key role in successfully integrating these components into the product development lifecycle. Existing models frequently encounter difficulties recognizing or adapting to novel instances not present in the original training dataset. This poses a significant risk for reliable deployment in dynamic environments. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive neural network architecture and an iterative development framework that enables users to efficiently incorporate previously unknown objects into the current perception system. Our approach builds on continuous learning, emphasizing the necessity of dynamic updates to reflect real-world deployment conditions. Specifically, we introduce a pipeline with three key components: (1) a scalable network extension strategy to integrate new classes while preserving existing performance, (2) a dynamic OoD detection component that requires no additional retraining for newly added classes, and (3) a retrieval-based data augmentation process tailored for safety-critical deployments. The integration of these components establishes a pragmatic and adaptive pipeline for the continuous evolution of perception systems in the context of autonomous driving.

Addressing the Out-of-Distribution (OoD) segmentation task is a prerequisite for perception systems operating in an open-world environment. Large foundational models are frequently used in downstream tasks, however, their potential for OoD remains mostly unexplored. We seek to leverage a large foundational model to achieve robust representation. Outlier supervision is a widely used strategy for improving OoD detection of the existing segmentation networks. However, current approaches for outlier supervision involve retraining parts of the original network, which is typically disruptive to the model's learned feature representation. Furthermore, retraining becomes infeasible in the case of large foundational models. Our goal is to retrain for outlier segmentation without compromising the strong representation space of the foundational model. To this end, we propose an adaptive, lightweight unknown estimation module (UEM) for outlier supervision that significantly enhances the OoD segmentation performance without affecting the learned feature representation of the original network. UEM learns a distribution for outliers and a generic distribution for known classes. Using the learned distributions, we propose a likelihood-ratio-based outlier scoring function that fuses the confidence of UEM with that of the pixel-wise segmentation inlier network to detect unknown objects. We also propose an objective to optimize this score directly. Our approach achieves a new state-of-the-art across multiple datasets, outperforming the previous best method by 5.74% average precision points while having a lower false-positive rate. Importantly, strong inlier performance remains unaffected. The code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/NazirNayal8/UEM-likelihood-ratio.

In the life cycle of highly automated systems operating in an open and dynamic environment, the ability to adjust to emerging challenges is crucial. For systems integrating data-driven AI-based components, rapid responses to deployment issues require fast access to related data for testing and reconfiguration. In the context of automated driving, this especially applies to road obstacles not included in the training data, commonly referred to as out-of-distribution (OoD) road obstacles. Given the availability of large uncurated driving scene recordings, a pragmatic approach is to query a database to retrieve similar scenarios featuring the same safety concerns due to OoD road obstacles. In this work, we extend beyond identifying OoD road obstacles in video streams and offer a comprehensive approach to extract sequences of OoD road obstacles using text queries, thereby proposing a way of curating a collection of OoD data for subsequent analysis. Our proposed method leverages the recent advances in OoD segmentation and multi-modal foundation models to identify and efficiently extract safety-relevant scenes from unlabeled videos. We present a first approach for the novel task of text-based OoD object retrieval, which addresses the question "Have we ever encountered this before?".