AutoDrive Papers

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) in robotics perception systems supports comprehensive 3D spatial scene understanding by integrating semantic segmentation and depth estimation. While Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) are increasingly adopted as robust feature encoders, existing decoding strategies present a critical bottleneck. To address this, we propose DPNeXt, a streamlined multi-scale feature fusion decoder and efficient alternative to the standard Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT). DPNeXt uses dual depthwise separable inverted bottlenecks to improve frozen VFM utilization through fusion-centric decoding and independent task modularization. To further mitigate negative inductive transfer between tasks, we introduce the Multi-Task Boundary Guidance (MTBG) strategy. Unlike prior boundary-aware methods that add fusion modules or gating, MTBG applies symmetric boundary-focused supervision to encourage geometric consistency without extra annotation or inference cost. Experiments on Cityscapes show that DPNeXt-S outperforms prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) MTL models, while DPNeXt-B further improves the overall performance and achieves the best results among the compared methods. On NYUv2, DPNeXt-B also achieves the best semantic segmentation and depth estimation results among the compared methods while requiring substantially fewer trainable parameters than prior large-scale MTL models. Compared with the standard DPT, DPNeXt-S reduces trainable parameters by 78.6% and achieves the fastest inference speed among the compared models on resource-constrained laptop hardware. The source code, model checkpoints, and a demo video will be made available at https://github.com/kangjehun/DPNeXt.

This study introduces a vision-language pipeline that detects risky driving behaviors and generates emotionally expressive responses to support driver awareness and comfort. Although vision-language models have advanced perception and reasoning in autonomous driving, existing systems rarely consider the emotional dimension or real-world user experience. Keep Yelling Assistant (KYA) detects high-risk driving maneuvers in real time, such as sudden cut-ins. It then produces emotional responses through a large language model tailored to driver preferences. The framework comprises two core modules. The vision module uses YOLOv8 variants to detect nearby vehicles and identify risky behaviors such as sudden cut-ins. Key driving metrics, including relative distance, speed, and projected reach time, are extracted and normalized to produce a structured behavior log. The language module processes this log with user-defined emotional tone settings, such as neutral, humorous, and analytical, and generates verbal reactions using state-of-the-art large language models, including ChatGPT-4o, Claude 3, Gemini 2.5, and Copilot. We evaluated the proposed system using dashcam videos containing risky driving behaviors and a user study involving 108 participants. Participants selected preferred response styles, and the large language models were evaluated based on emotional alignment. All models received favorable ratings, although preferences varied across personas. Notably, the combination of YOLOv8s and ChatGPT-4o achieved the highest score of 4.29 out of 5.00. By integrating real-world perception with emotionally adaptive dialogue, KYA introduces a new paradigm for emotionally intelligent in-vehicle artificial intelligence. It offers promising directions for improving safety, trust, and emotional well-being in both conventional and autonomous vehicles.

Reliable roadside perception of vulnerable road users (VRUs) remains challenging under occlusions, variable lighting, and diverse weather conditions, particularly under strict edge-computing and latency constraints. Existing multi-sensor fusion systems rely on cloud or server-grade infrastructure, creating a deployment gap at real-world intersections. We present CLIFE, an edge-native camera-LiDAR fusion framework that integrates targetless online calibration and lightweight late-fusion tracking entirely on a single embedded device, without cloud offloading. CLIFE adaptively refines camera-LiDAR alignment on demand and performs multi-sensor fusion and track association with O(N log N) per-frame cost. We deploy CLIFE across 12 signalized intersections in Chattanooga and conduct an in-depth evaluation at a representative intersection using synchronized camera-LiDAR data that spans diverse daytime, nighttime, and weather conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that the fusion architecture substantially enhances the perceptual range and robustness of the individual sensors under varied environmental and traffic conditions. The late-fusion core operates at 53.2 FPS on the Jetson AGX Thor, ensuring high throughput for real-time intersection-scale applications. By centering perception at the edge, CLIFE provides a deployable foundation for downstream safety applications, while reducing bandwidth and calibration overhead for agencies operating multi-intersection corridors.

Accurate temporal alignment of heterogeneous sensors is necessary for reliable environment perception in roadside multi-lidar, multi-camera systems, particularly in dense urban traffic. For this purpose, an open-source, simple, modular, and configurable hardware-triggered time-synchronization circuit is presented in this work to perform temporal alignment or accurate time synchronization between a lidar and multiple cameras. In the designed circuit, a lidar synchronization pulse is used as a reference input, and independently programmable, time-delayed trigger pulses are generated for each camera, allowing flexible adaptation to varying sensor setups and mounting geometries. A series of experiments is conducted on a roadside-mounted perception system comprised of lidar and three cameras, in which the trigger delay is systematically varied, and its impact on spatial-temporal alignment is evaluated. For different classes of road users, the overlap between lidar point cloud measurements and camera measurements is quantified to identify delay configurations that maximize cross-sensor consistency. The proposed circuit is shown to achieve robust and repeatable synchronization while remaining straightforward to deploy, reconfigure, and extend due to its simple and open-source design. Following validation on a three-camera roadside system, the circuit is extended to a vehicle platform with seven cameras and a lidar, providing a low-cost, extensible solution for multi-sensor synchronization across infrastructure and vehicle setups. All hardware circuit design files and source codes are available at https://github.com/shiva-THI/hardware-trigger-time-sync-lidar-cameras.

Cross-view geo-localization matches ground-level observations against geo-tagged satellite imagery. Recent methods show that sequential queries such as video clips yield richer spatiotemporal cues than single images, yet they overlook a complementary sequential modality: route descriptions -- which capture the same trajectory at a higher level of abstraction and are often the only input available (e.g., a user directing an autonomous vehicle to a pickup point). To bridge this gap, we introduce SeqGeo-VL, a dataset of $\sim$39K video-text-satellite triplets, and TrajLoc, a unified framework capable of processing both video clips and route descriptions. By leveraging both dense visual and abstract linguistic semantics, TrajLoc enables these modalities to mutually reinforce cross-view matching. We further propose TrajMod, a lightweight module that conditions query embeddings on trajectory geometry, yielding spatially-aware representations. Experiments show that TrajLoc achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art methods on both video and text geo-localization. The project page is available at https://humblegamer.github.io/trajloc/.

Large language models bring instruction following and scene reasoning to end-to-end driving, but their inference latency collides with the control rate a vehicle requires. Existing closed-loop agents hide this gap by invoking the model on alternate simulation ticks and replaying the previous command in between, so half of all control outputs ignore the newest observations. We present a fast-slow architecture that removes this compromise. A frozen 7B vision-language backbone acts as the slow system, digesting navigation instructions and visual history at low frequency while exposing its per-layer key-value cache as a standing representation of the scene. A lightweight action expert acts as the fast system, attending to this cache and to the current camera frame at every simulation tick to regress waypoints in a single forward pass. Since the cache lags behind the world at deployment, we train the expert under randomized staleness, aligning training with asynchronous execution. On LangAuto-Short routes in CARLA, our system produces fresh control at every 50 ms simulation tick and lifts route completion from 37.0 to 94.0 over the frame-skipping baseline. A frame-skip ablation with the same expert separates the two factors at work: the expert raises the driving score on its own, while per-tick freshness raises completion from 82.1 to 94.0 and cuts red-light violations by a third. Trained on a single town, the expert transfers zero-shot to two unseen towns, holding 84-94% route completion where the baseline reaches 31-41%. It reduces open-loop waypoint error by nearly a factor of four compared to the backbone's own action head, at a per-tick model cost of 32 ms that is independent of history length on a single consumer GPU.