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Guofa Li

Publications and source records attributed to Guofa Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms

End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from camera-to-control regression toward planning-oriented systems that use structured representations, trajectory-level outputs, and increasingly realistic evaluation protocols. This survey reviews this transition across behavior cloning, conditional imitation learning, privileged distillation, BEV and vectorized planning, unified perception-prediction-planning architectures, world-model-based planners, and vision-language-action systems. We argue that the key distinction in modern end-to-end driving is not whether intermediate representations are used, but whether they are learned, supervised, and evaluated to support safe, feasible, and route-compliant planning. To organize the literature, we synthesize existing methods along four axes: input representation, planning output, supervision signal, and evaluation protocol. We further examine the benchmark shift from open-loop trajectory matching to closed-loop simulation, non-reactive real-log evaluation, long-tail testing, and human-preference-aware metrics. Our analysis highlights that architectural progress is difficult to interpret without benchmark-consistent evaluation, and that displacement-based open-loop metrics alone provide limited evidence for safe and human-aligned driving. We conclude with open challenges in uncertainty-aware planning, learner-expert mismatch, runtime safety assurance, language-action grounding, world-model validation, and reproducible benchmarking.

cs.RO

FastDSAC: Enhancing Policy Plasticity via Constrained Exploration for Scalable Humanoid Locomotion

Scalable reinforcement learning has popularized high-throughput sampling architectures, which significantly compresses the training time for off-policy methods in robotic locomotion. However, the rapid increase of data volume and update frequency undermines the stability of value-based methods and diminishes the plasticity of policy networks. To address these challenges, this work presents FastDSAC, a fast and high-performance variant of the Distributional Actor-Critic algorithm designed for parallel sampling scenarios. Specifically, we introduce a truncated Gaussian distribution to approximate the learned policy, which effectively excludes out-of-distribution actions that strain target value estimation while keeping necessary stochasticity for exploration. The proposed action constraint functions as an implicit regularization, which counteracts the plasticity loss typically caused by aggressive gradient updates. This preservation of network adaptability enhances sample efficiency, particularly in scenarios with a high update-to-data ratio, and accelerates the early training process. In contrast to prior fast reinforcement learning approaches that rely on discrete value distributions, our method utilizes a continuous Gaussian representation equipped with adaptive variance regulation, which improves value estimation accuracy by sampling confident and informative transitions. Extensive experiments on MuJoCo Playground and HumanoidBench demonstrate that FastDSAC not only stabilizes the overall training process but also achieves superior asymptotic performance and faster convergence compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.RO

LWDrive: Layer-Wise World-Model-Guided Vision-Language Model Planning for Autonomous Driving

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide powerful semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) planning. However, trajectories directly generated by VLMs often encode only coarse driving intentions and remain insufficient for geometrically accurate, future-aware, and multi-view-grounded planning. To address these limitations, we develop the Layer-Wise World-Model-Guided Driving framework (LWDrive). LWDrive is a VLM planning framework that refines coarse trajectories through layer-wise world-model guidance. Instead of treating the VLM output as the final trajectory, LWDrive uses it as an intent-aware coarse plan, expands a diverse candidate space around it, and progressively refines the candidates through a Foresight Cascade Planner (FCP). Specifically, we introduce future-frame generation supervision to encourage the VLM to learn forward-looking scene representations, thereby injecting planning-relevant predictive dynamics into its internal hidden states. Built upon these world-model-supervised representations, FCP exploits VLM features across multiple layers and integrates historical temporal states, Action-Query representations, and current-frame multi-view Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features to refine candidate trajectories in a coarse-to-fine manner. This design enables progressive correction of spatial positions and motion trends while grounding trajectory refinement with multi-view scene cues and preserving the high-level driving intention produced by the large model. Finally, a score head evaluates the refined candidates and selects the best trajectory as the final planning output. Experiments show that LWDrive achieves a score of 92.0 on the NAVSIM benchmark and 89.6 on NAVSIM-v2. Code and models will be made publicly available.

cs.CV

From Sparse and Imperfect 2D Anchors to Consistent 3D Gaussian Street Scenes: Support-Aware Appearance

Image priors can synthesize target conditions for 3D Gaussian street scenes, but independently edited views do not define a coherent 3D target. Direct fitting can propagate view-specific noise, while existing pipelines do not jointly handle imperfect sparse anchors and standard-rasterizer deployment. To address this gap, teacher-relative appearance residual distillation is introduced for appearance baking. A structured space for frequency decomposition, confidence estimation, and primitive-level lifting is formed by residuals between teacher anchors and original renders. The direct optimization signal is supplied by renderer-space matching, while primitive assignment is regularized by support-aware Gaussian-space aggregation. Supported detail is admitted and unsupported noise is suppressed through confidence-gated coarse-to-fine optimization, after which all residuals are baked into fixed-geometry spherical-harmonic coefficients. The teacher and auxiliary training modules are discarded at inference. Evaluation across Waymo street assets, Tanks and Temples scenes, and multiple target conditions shows a favorable overall balance of target alignment, content preservation, artifact suppression, and cross-view consistency over editing-based baselines. Ablations confirm the effectiveness of the main components. Code will be released at https://github.com/Cagares/Baking-for-3D-Gaussian.

cs.CV

Gaussian Light Field Splatting: A Physical Prior-Driven Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing unsupervised low-light image enhancement methods often encounter local exposure imbalance and color distortion under complex non-uniform illumination. In addition, most Vision Transformers lack an explicit mechanism for modeling the physical priors of illumination degradation. To address these limitations, we propose GLFS, a Gaussian light field splatting-based Vision Transformer that integrates continuous physical illumination modeling from Gaussian splatting into the Transformer architecture. In GLFS, scene illumination is represented by a superposition of anisotropic Gaussian basis functions. Physics-guided biases are introduced into self-attention to adaptively infer a spatial gain field, enabling accurate and uniform restoration under complex illumination. To reduce color bias and structural degradation during enhancement, a color-vector angular loss and a luminance-edge loss are further developed. These losses enforce hue consistency and improve the structural fidelity of local details. Extensive ablation studies and quantitative evaluations show that GLFS provides clear advantages in illumination correction and detail preservation. It achieves state-of-the-art performance and offers a new representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

cs.CV

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

cs.CV

Continuous Splatting meets Retinex: Continuous Gaussian Splatting and Implicit Reflectance Modeling for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement aims to recover clear images from low-illumination observations and is crucial for high-level downstream vision tasks. However, existing methods frequently encounter color distortion and structural artifacts when balancing global smooth illumination adjustment and local high-frequency detail recovery. To address these issues, we propose CGS-Retinex as the first low-light image enhancement framework based on explicit-implicit joint modeling. Our framework deeply integrates continuous Gaussian splatting with Retinex theory. Specifically, we represent the image grid as a continuous parameter field and propose a continuous Gaussian renderer to estimate the spatially continuous global illumination distribution. This approach fundamentally eliminates grid artifacts caused by discrete Gaussian sampling. Furthermore, we introduce an implicit neural representation to model reflectance independently. We leverage shallow high-frequency features to guide the network in accurately reconstructing degraded texture details. Within the Retinex framework, we incorporate physics-inspired brightness consistency constraints and illumination smoothness regularization to enable explicit illumination and implicit reflectance to maintain proper exposure and achieve high-fidelity recovery of high-frequency structures and colors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CGS-Retinex significantly suppresses dark-region noise and overexposure while achieving exceptional high-frequency structural fidelity and color restoration by precisely decoupling illumination and texture. This work establishes a novel continuous physical representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

cs.CV

Dehaze-GaussianImage: Zero-Shot Dehazing via Efficient 2D Gaussian Splatting Representation

Existing single image dehazing methods are often constrained by computational redundancy in pixel-level optimization and the lack of physical interpretability in implicit neural networks. These limitations hinder the balance between representation efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. To address these issues, we propose Dehaze-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) into the image dehazing domain to break the traditional pixel-grid processing paradigm. Distinct from static convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformers, our approach models hazy images as continuous and dynamically evolvable anisotropic Gaussian fields. Specifically, we propose a novel reconstruction-decoupling zero-shot learning strategy that embeds the atmospheric scattering model into the Gaussian parameter space. This strategy drives Gaussian primitives to adaptively split, clone, and prune during optimization, achieving geometric-level decoupling of the transmission medium and clear textures. Furthermore, explicit structure-preserving constraints are introduced to suppress artifacts commonly caused by traditional physical priors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a fully unsupervised manner with minimal parameters, highlighting the potential of explicit Gaussian representation for low-level vision tasks.

cs.CV

Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing

Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks.

cs.CV

RiskFlow: Fast and Faithful Safety-Critical Traffic Scenario Generation

Safety-critical traffic scenario generation is essential for evaluating autonomous driving systems under rare but high-risk interactions. Existing diffusion-based methods offer strong controllability in closed-loop generation, but their iterative denoising process is computationally expensive and may accumulate sampling and guidance errors over long rollouts, causing unrealistic motion artifacts such as jitter, abnormal acceleration, and off-road behavior. To address these issues, we propose RiskFlow, a closed-loop safety-critical multi-agent traffic generation framework that formulates future trajectory generation as transport in the action space. Instead of relying on iterative denoising, RiskFlow learns an average velocity field over a finite interval to transform Gaussian action sequences into future acceleration and yaw-rate commands with a single forward pass, using a JVP-based objective for efficient and stable training. At test time, RiskFlow applies output-space guidance to the generated actions, steering selected critical agents toward risky interactions while regularizing off-road behavior, and reconstructs physically feasible trajectories through vehicle dynamics. Experiments on nuScenes with tbsim closed-loop evaluation show that RiskFlow achieves a strong adversariality-realism trade-off across multi-agent and long-horizon settings. Compared with representative baselines, RiskFlow consistently improves realism while maintaining competitive safety-critical generation capability, and substantially reduces inference time for evaluation.

cs.RO

On the Optimization Landscape of Observer-based Dynamic Linear Quadratic Control

Understanding the optimization landscape of linear quadratic regulation (LQR) problems is fundamental to the design of efficient reinforcement learning solutions. Recent work has made significant progress in characterizing the landscape of static output-feedback control and linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control. For LQG, much of the analysis leverages the separation principle, which allows the controller and estimator to be designed independently. However, this simplification breaks down when the gradients with respect to the estimator and controller parameters are inherently coupled, leading to a more intricate analysis. This paper investigates the optimization landscape of observer-based dynamic output-feedback control of LQR problems. We derive the optimal observer-controller pair in settings where transient quadratic performance cannot be neglected. Our analysis reveals that, in general, the combination of the standard LQR controller and the observer that minimizes the trace of the accumulated estimation error covariance does not correspond to a stationary point of the overall closed-loop performance objective. Moreover, we derive a pair of discrete-time Sylvester equations with symmetric structure, both involving the same set of matrix elements, that characterize the stationary point of the observer-based dynamic LQR problem. These equations offer analytical insight into the structure of the optimality conditions and provide a foundation for developing numerical policy gradient methods aimed at learning complex controllers that rely on reconstructed state information.

eess.SY

KGS-GCN: Kinematics-Driven Gaussian Splatting and Probabilistic Topology for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition is widely applied in sensor-based systems, including human-computer interaction and intelligent surveillance. However, typical sensors produce sparse and discrete joint coordinates, often leading to the loss of fine-grained spatiotemporal information during dynamic movements. Furthermore, predefined physical topologies restrict modeling potential long-range dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose KGS-GCN, which integrates kinematics-driven Gaussian splatting and probabilistic topology within a graph convolutional network. A Gaussian splatting module constructs anisotropic covariance matrices by extracting instantaneous joint velocity vectors, rendering sparse skeleton sequences into multi-view continuous heatmaps rich in spatiotemporal semantics. Additionally, a probabilistic topology construction strategy transcends physical connectivity limitations by utilizing the Bhattacharyya distance to quantify statistical correlations between joint Gaussian distributions, generating an adaptive prior adjacency matrix. Finally, the lightweight multi-view rendering branch and topological GCN backbone are unified through a visual context gating mechanism, enabling seamless fusion of continuous dynamic cues with structural priors while maintaining high computational efficiency, requiring only 1.4M parameters and 1.3 GFLOPs. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that KGS-GCN significantly enhances the modeling of complex spatiotemporal dynamics and achieves competitive performance at low computational cost, establishing an efficient paradigm for improving the perceptual robustness of low-fidelity sensor data.

cs.CV

LL-GaussianMap: Zero-shot Low-Light Image Enhancement via 2D Gaussian Splatting Guided Gain Maps

Significant progress has been made in low-light image enhancement with respect to visual quality. However, most existing methods primarily operate in the pixel domain or rely on implicit feature representations. As a result, the intrinsic geometric structural priors of images are often neglected. 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) has emerged as a prominent explicit scene representation technique characterized by superior structural fitting capabilities and high rendering efficiency. Despite these advantages, the utilization of 2DGS in low-level vision tasks remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, LL-GaussianMap is proposed as the first unsupervised framework incorporating 2DGS into low-light image enhancement. Distinct from conventional methodologies, the enhancement task is formulated as a gain map generation process guided by 2DGS primitives. The proposed method comprises two primary stages. First, high-fidelity structural reconstruction is executed utilizing 2DGS. Then, data-driven enhancement dictionary coefficients are rendered via the rasterization mechanism of Gaussian splatting through an innovative unified enhancement module. This design effectively incorporates the structural perception capabilities of 2DGS into gain map generation, thereby preserving edges and suppressing artifacts during enhancement. Additionally, the reliance on paired data is circumvented through unsupervised learning. Experimental results demonstrate that LL-GaussianMap achieves superior enhancement performance with an extremely low storage footprint, highlighting the effectiveness of explicit Gaussian representations for image enhancement.

cs.CV

LL-GaussianImage: Efficient Image Representation for Zero-shot Low-Light Enhancement with 2D Gaussian Splatting

2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) is an emerging explicit scene representation method with significant potential for image compression due to high fidelity and high compression ratios. However, existing low-light enhancement algorithms operate predominantly within the pixel domain. Processing 2DGS-compressed images necessitates a cumbersome decompression-enhancement-recompression pipeline, which compromises efficiency and introduces secondary degradation. To address these limitations, we propose LL-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot unsupervised framework designed for low-light enhancement directly within the 2DGS compressed representation domain. Three primary advantages are offered by this framework. First, a semantic-guided Mixture-of-Experts enhancement framework is designed. Dynamic adaptive transformations are applied to the sparse attribute space of 2DGS using rendered images as guidance to enable compression-as-enhancement without full decompression to a pixel grid. Second, a multi-objective collaborative loss function system is established to strictly constrain smoothness and fidelity during enhancement, suppressing artifacts while improving visual quality. Third, a two-stage optimization process is utilized to achieve reconstruction-as-enhancement. The accuracy of the base representation is ensured through single-scale reconstruction and network robustness is enhanced. High-quality enhancement of low-light images is achieved while high compression ratios are maintained. The feasibility and superiority of the paradigm for direct processing within the compressed representation domain are validated through experimental results.

cs.CV

Multimodal Classification Network Guided Trajectory Planning for Four-Wheel Independent Steering Autonomous Parking Considering Obstacle Attributes

Four-wheel Independent Steering (4WIS) vehicles have attracted increasing attention for their superior maneuverability. Human drivers typically choose to cross or drive over the low-profile obstacles (e.g., plastic bags) to efficiently navigate through narrow spaces, while existing planners neglect obstacle attributes, leading to suboptimal efficiency or planning failures. To address this issue, we propose a novel multimodal trajectory planning framework that employs a neural network for scene perception, combines 4WIS hybrid A* search to generate a warm start, and utilizes an optimal control problem (OCP) for trajectory optimization. Specifically, a multimodal perception network fusing visual information and vehicle states is employed to capture semantic and contextual scene understanding, enabling the planner to adapt the strategy according to scene complexity (hard or easy task). For hard tasks, guided points are introduced to decompose complex tasks into local subtasks, improving the search efficiency. The multiple steering modes of 4WIS vehicles, Ackermann, diagonal, and zero-turn, are also incorporated as kinematically feasible motion primitives. Moreover, a hierarchical obstacle handling strategy, which categorizes obstacles as "non-traversable", "crossable", and "drive-over", is incorporated into the node expansion process, explicitly linking obstacle attributes to planning actions to enable efficient decisions. Furthermore, to address dynamic obstacles with motion uncertainty, we introduce a probabilistic risk field model, constructing risk-aware driving corridors that serve as linear collision constraints in OCP. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed framework's effectiveness in generating safe, efficient, and smooth trajectories for 4WIS vehicles, especially in constrained environments.

cs.RO

Shift-Window Meets Dual Attention: A Multi-Model Architecture for Specular Highlight Removal

Inevitable specular highlights in practical environments severely impair the visual performance, thus degrading the task effectiveness and efficiency. Although there exist considerable methods that focus on local information from convolutional neural network models or global information from transformer models, the single-type model falls into a modeling dilemma between local fine-grained details and global long-range dependencies, thus deteriorating for specular highlights with different scales. Therefore, to accommodate specular highlights of all scales, we propose a multi-model architecture for specular highlight removal (MM-SHR) that effectively captures fine-grained features in highlight regions and models long-range dependencies between highlight and highlight-free areas. Specifically, we employ convolution operations to extract local details in the shallow layers of MM-SHR, and utilize the attention mechanism to capture global features in the deep layers, ensuring both operation efficiency and removal accuracy. To model long-range dependencies without compromising computational complexity, we utilize a coarse-to-fine manner and propose Omni-Directional Attention Integration Block(OAIBlock) and Adaptive Region-Aware Hybrid-Domain Dual Attention Convolutional Network(HDDAConv) , which leverage omni-directiona pixel-shifting and window-dividing operations at the raw features to achieve specular highlight removal. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark tasks and six types of surface materials demonstrate that MM-SHR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency for specular highlight removal. The implementation will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Htcicv/MM-SHR.

cs.CV

UltraFast-LiNET: Light-weight multi-scale shift convolutional network for real-time low-light image enhancement

Addressing the urgent need for high-performance real-time low-light image enhancement on resource-constrained edge devices in low-illumination scenarios such as nighttime and tunnels, this paper presents UltraFast-LiNET, an ultra-lightweight network designed for extreme efficiency. The proposed network introduces Dynamic Shift Convolution, DSConv, a highly compact operation with only 12 learnable parameters. By using DSConv to construct a Multi-Scale Shift Residual Block, MSRB, UltraFast-LiNET effectively enlarges the receptive field while maintaining an exceptionally small parameter count. To alleviate gradient instability during the training of lightweight models, we further propose a multi-level gradient-aware loss function that strengthens supervision signals across different feature levels. UltraFast-LiNET supports flexible parameter configurations, enabling the model size to be reduced to as few as 36 learnable parameters. Remarkably, with only 180 learnable parameters, UltraFast-LiNET achieves a PSNR of 19.81 dB on the LOL dataset, surpassing the current state-of-the-art by 0.08 dB. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an effective balance between millisecond-level real-time processing and superior enhancement quality under extreme computational constraints. These results highlight its chip-level computational efficiency and broad prospects for edge-side deployment.

cs.CV

Map-World: Masked Action planning and Path-Integral World Model for Autonomous Driving

Motion planning for autonomous driving must handle multiple plausible futures while remaining computationally efficient. Recent end-to-end systems and world-model-based planners predict rich multi-modal trajectories, but typically rely on handcrafted anchors or reinforcement learning to select a single best mode for training and control. This selection discards information about alternative futures and complicates optimization. We propose MAP-World, a prior-free multi-modal planning framework that couples masked action planning with a path-weighted world model. The Masked Action Planning (MAP) module treats future ego motion as masked sequence completion: past waypoints are encoded as visible tokens, future waypoints are represented as mask tokens, and a driving-intent path provides a coarse scaffold. A compact latent planning state is expanded into multiple trajectory queries with injected noise, yielding diverse, temporally consistent modes without anchor libraries or teacher policies. A lightweight world model then rolls out future BEV semantics conditioned on each candidate trajectory. During training, semantic losses are computed as an expectation over modes, using trajectory probabilities as discrete path weights, so the planner learns from the full distribution of plausible futures instead of a single selected path. On NAVSIM, our method matches anchor-based approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance among world-model-based methods, while avoiding reinforcement learning and maintaining real-time inference latency.

cs.CV