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Fabian Hueger

Publications and source records attributed to Fabian Hueger.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

RoG-DAgger: Rollout-Guided Post-Training for End-to-End Driving

Recent end-to-end driving systems demonstrate strong performance on closed-loop benchmarks, yet are still predominantly trained on fixed expert-collected data using open-loop imitation learning. This training-inference mismatch leaves the policy vulnerable in policy-induced states, where accumulated errors can lead to safety-critical failures. A promising post-training approach to overcome this issue is Dataset Aggregation (DAgger), which gathers expert demonstrations in policy-induced states and subsequently fine-tunes the policy on the resulting aggregated dataset. Existing driving DAgger pipelines, however, face three challenges: i) the expert is restricted to a limited trajectory-and-speed solution space, ii) takeover may occur too early or too late relative to impending failures, and iii) privileged expert decisions may rely on information unavailable to the student. To address this, we introduce RoG-DAgger, a post-training framework that uses short-horizon kinematic rollouts to construct high-quality expert demonstrations in safety-critical states. Specifically, RoG-DAgger expands the expert's trajectory-and-speed solution space and evaluates candidate plans through rollout to construct preventive supervision. Moreover, it uses rollout solvability to time the takeover near the estimated point of no return. Lastly, it aligns the expert's field of view with that of the student to provide student-compatible supervision. Across in-distribution (including long-horizon) and out-of-distribution evaluations, RoG-DAgger improves the end-to-end model SimLingo by 5.3 driving-score points and 6.2 percentage points in success rate on Bench2Drive, doubles its driving score from 22 to 44 on Longest6 v2, and improves out-of-distribution success rate from 55\% to 66\% on Fail2Drive.

cs.RO

Spatio-Temporal Attention for Consistent Video Semantic Segmentation in Automated Driving

Deep neural networks, especially transformer-based architectures, have achieved remarkable success in semantic segmentation for environmental perception. However, existing models process video frames independently, thus failing to leverage temporal consistency, which could significantly improve both accuracy and stability in dynamic scenes. In this work, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Attention (STA) mechanism that extends transformer attention blocks to incorporate multi-frame context, enabling robust temporal feature representations for video semantic segmentation. Our approach modifies standard self-attention to process spatio-temporal feature sequences while maintaining computational efficiency and requiring minimal changes to existing architectures. STA demonstrates broad applicability across diverse transformer architectures and remains effective across both lightweight and larger-scale models. A comprehensive evaluation on the Cityscapes and BDD100k datasets shows substantial improvements of 9.20 percentage points in temporal consistency metrics and up to 1.76 percentage points in mean intersection over union compared to single-frame baselines. These results demonstrate STA as an effective architectural enhancement for video-based semantic segmentation applications.

cs.CV

Plants Don't Walk on the Street: Common-Sense Reasoning for Reliable Semantic Segmentation

Data-driven sensor interpretation in autonomous driving can lead to highly implausible predictions as can most of the time be verified with common-sense knowledge. However, learning common knowledge only from data is hard and approaches for knowledge integration are an active research area. We propose to use a partly human-designed, partly learned set of rules to describe relations between objects of a traffic scene on a high level of abstraction. In doing so, we improve and robustify existing deep neural networks consuming low-level sensor information. We present an initial study adapting the well-established Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL) framework to validate and improve on the problem of semantic segmentation. We describe in detail how we integrate common knowledge into the segmentation pipeline using PSL and verify our approach in a set of experiments demonstrating the increase in robustness against several severe image distortions applied to the A2D2 autonomous driving data set.

cs.CV

Street-Map Based Validation of Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving

Artificial intelligence for autonomous driving must meet strict requirements on safety and robustness, which motivates the thorough validation of learned models. However, current validation approaches mostly require ground truth data and are thus both cost-intensive and limited in their applicability. We propose to overcome these limitations by a model agnostic validation using a-priori knowledge from street maps. In particular, we show how to validate semantic segmentation masks and demonstrate the potential of our approach using OpenStreetMap. We introduce validation metrics that indicate false positive or negative road segments. Besides the validation approach, we present a method to correct the vehicle's GPS position so that a more accurate localization can be used for the street-map based validation. Lastly, we present quantitative results on the Cityscapes dataset indicating that our validation approach can indeed uncover errors in semantic segmentation masks.

cs.CV

Improving Video Instance Segmentation by Light-weight Temporal Uncertainty Estimates

Instance segmentation with neural networks is an essential task in environment perception. In many works, it has been observed that neural networks can predict false positive instances with high confidence values and true positives with low ones. Thus, it is important to accurately model the uncertainties of neural networks in order to prevent safety issues and foster interpretability. In applications such as automated driving, the reliability of neural networks is of highest interest. In this paper, we present a time-dynamic approach to model uncertainties of instance segmentation networks and apply this to the detection of false positives as well as the estimation of prediction quality. The availability of image sequences in online applications allows for tracking instances over multiple frames. Based on an instances history of shape and uncertainty information, we construct temporal instance-wise aggregated metrics. The latter are used as input to post-processing models that estimate the prediction quality in terms of instance-wise intersection over union. The proposed method only requires a readily trained neural network (that may operate on single frames) and video sequence input. In our experiments, we further demonstrate the use of the proposed method by replacing the traditional score value from object detection and thereby improving the overall performance of the instance segmentation network.

cs.CV

Towards Map-Based Validation of Semantic Segmentation Masks

Artificial intelligence for autonomous driving must meet strict requirements on safety and robustness. We propose to validate machine learning models for self-driving vehicles not only with given ground truth labels, but also with additional a-priori knowledge. In particular, we suggest to validate the drivable area in semantic segmentation masks using given street map data. We present first results, which indicate that prediction errors can be uncovered by map-based validation.

cs.CV