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Xiao Tan

Publications and source records attributed to Xiao Tan.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Safe Navigation under State Uncertainty: Online Adaptation for Robust Control Barrier Functions

Measurements and state estimates are often imperfect in control practice, posing challenges for safety-critical applications, where safety guarantees rely on accurate state information. In the presence of estimation errors, several prior robust control barrier function (R-CBF) formulations have imposed strict conditions on the input. These methods can be overly conservative and can introduce issues such as infeasibility, high control effort, etc. This work proposes a systematic method to improve R-CBFs, and demonstrates its advantages on a tracked vehicle that navigates among multiple obstacles. A primary contribution is a new optimization-based online parameter adaptation scheme that reduces the conservativeness of existing R-CBFs. In order to reduce the complexity of the parameter optimization, we merge several safety constraints into one unified numerical CBF via Poisson's equation. We further address the dual relative degree issue that typically causes difficulty in vehicle tracking. Experimental trials demonstrate the overall performance improvement of our approach over existing formulations.

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HisTrackMap: Global Vectorized High-Definition Map Construction via History Map Tracking

As an essential component of autonomous driving systems, high-definition (HD) maps provide rich and precise environmental information for auto-driving scenarios; however, existing methods, which primarily rely on query-based detection frameworks to directly model map elements or implicitly propagate queries over time, often struggle to maintain consistent temporal perception outcomes. These inconsistencies pose significant challenges to the stability and reliability of real-world autonomous driving and map data collection systems. To address this limitation, we propose a novel end-to-end tracking framework for global map construction by temporally tracking map elements' historical trajectories. Firstly, instance-level historical rasterization map representation is designed to explicitly store previous perception results, which can control and maintain different global instances' history information in a fine-grained way. Secondly, we introduce a Map-Trajectory Prior Fusion module within this tracking framework, leveraging historical priors for tracked instances to improve temporal smoothness and continuity. Thirdly, we propose a global perspective metric to evaluate the quality of temporal geometry construction in HD maps, filling the gap in current metrics for assessing global geometric perception results. Substantial experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both single-frame and temporal metrics. The project page is available at: https://yj772881654.github.io/HisTrackMap.

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CoT4Det: A Chain-of-Thought Framework for Perception-Oriented Vision-Language Tasks

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in a broad range of vision-language tasks, such as general visual question answering and optical character recognition (OCR). However, their performance on perception-centric tasks -- such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation -- remains significantly inferior to that of task-specific expert models. For example, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct achieves only 19% mAP on COCO2017 val, particularly struggling with dense scenes and small object recall. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Thought for Detection (CoT4Det), a simple but efficient strategy that reformulates perception tasks into three interpretable steps: classification, counting, and grounding -- each more naturally aligned with the reasoning capabilities of LVLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves perception performance without compromising general vision language capabilities. With a standard Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, CoT4Det boosts mAP from 19.0% to 33.0% on COCO2017 val and achieves competitive results across a variety of perception benchmarks, outperforming baselines by +2% on RefCOCO series and 19% on Flickr30k entities.

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Fin3R: Fine-tuning Feed-forward 3D Reconstruction Models via Monocular Knowledge Distillation

We present Fin3R, a simple, effective, and general fine-tuning method for feed-forward 3D reconstruction models. The family of feed-forward reconstruction model regresses pointmap of all input images to a reference frame coordinate system, along with other auxiliary outputs, in a single forward pass. However, we find that current models struggle with fine geometry and robustness due to (\textit{i}) the scarcity of high-fidelity depth and pose supervision and (\textit{ii}) the inherent geometric misalignment from multi-view pointmap regression. Fin3R jointly tackles two issues with an extra lightweight fine-tuning step. We freeze the decoder, which handles view matching, and fine-tune only the image encoder-the component dedicated to feature extraction. The encoder is enriched with fine geometric details distilled from a strong monocular teacher model on large, unlabeled datasets, using a custom, lightweight LoRA adapter. We validate our method on a wide range of models, including DUSt3R, MASt3R, CUT3R, and VGGT. The fine-tuned models consistently deliver sharper boundaries, recover complex structures, and achieve higher geometric accuracy in both single- and multi-view settings, while adding only the tiny LoRA weights, which leave test-time memory and latency virtually unchanged. Project page: \href{http://visual-ai.github.io/fin3r}{https://visual-ai.github.io/fin3r}

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AdaDrive: Self-Adaptive Slow-Fast System for Language-Grounded Autonomous Driving

Effectively integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous driving requires a balance between leveraging high-level reasoning and maintaining real-time efficiency. Existing approaches either activate LLMs too frequently, causing excessive computational overhead, or use fixed schedules, failing to adapt to dynamic driving conditions. To address these challenges, we propose AdaDrive, an adaptively collaborative slow-fast framework that optimally determines when and how LLMs contribute to decision-making. (1) When to activate the LLM: AdaDrive employs a novel adaptive activation loss that dynamically determines LLM invocation based on a comparative learning mechanism, ensuring activation only in complex or critical scenarios. (2) How to integrate LLM assistance: Instead of rigid binary activation, AdaDrive introduces an adaptive fusion strategy that modulates a continuous, scaled LLM influence based on scene complexity and prediction confidence, ensuring seamless collaboration with conventional planners. Through these strategies, AdaDrive provides a flexible, context-aware framework that maximizes decision accuracy without compromising real-time performance. Extensive experiments on language-grounded autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that AdaDrive state-of-the-art performance in terms of both driving accuracy and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/ReaFly/AdaDrive.

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VLDrive: Vision-Augmented Lightweight MLLMs for Efficient Language-grounded Autonomous Driving

Recent advancements in language-grounded autonomous driving have been significantly promoted by the sophisticated cognition and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, current LLM-based approaches encounter critical challenges: (1) Failure analysis reveals that frequent collisions and obstructions, stemming from limitations in visual representations, remain primary obstacles to robust driving performance. (2) The substantial parameters of LLMs pose considerable deployment hurdles. To address these limitations, we introduce VLDrive, a novel approach featuring a lightweight MLLM architecture with enhanced vision components. VLDrive achieves compact visual tokens through innovative strategies, including cycle-consistent dynamic visual pruning and memory-enhanced feature aggregation. Furthermore, we propose a distance-decoupled instruction attention mechanism to improve joint visual-linguistic feature learning, particularly for long-range visual tokens. Extensive experiments conducted in the CARLA simulator demonstrate VLDrive`s effectiveness. Notably, VLDrive achieves state-of-the-art driving performance while reducing parameters by 81% (from 7B to 1.3B), yielding substantial driving score improvements of 15.4%, 16.8%, and 7.6% at tiny, short, and long distances, respectively, in closed-loop evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/ReaFly/VLDrive.

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LaneDiffusion: Improving Centerline Graph Learning via Prior Injected BEV Feature Generation

Centerline graphs, crucial for path planning in autonomous driving, are traditionally learned using deterministic methods. However, these methods often lack spatial reasoning and struggle with occluded or invisible centerlines. Generative approaches, despite their potential, remain underexplored in this domain. We introduce LaneDiffusion, a novel generative paradigm for centerline graph learning. LaneDiffusion innovatively employs diffusion models to generate lane centerline priors at the Bird's Eye View (BEV) feature level, instead of directly predicting vectorized centerlines. Our method integrates a Lane Prior Injection Module (LPIM) and a Lane Prior Diffusion Module (LPDM) to effectively construct diffusion targets and manage the diffusion process. Furthermore, vectorized centerlines and topologies are then decoded from these prior-injected BEV features. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate that LaneDiffusion significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving improvements of 4.2%, 4.6%, 4.7%, 6.4% and 1.8% on fine-grained point-level metrics (GEO F1, TOPO F1, JTOPO F1, APLS and SDA) and 2.3%, 6.4%, 6.8% and 2.1% on segment-level metrics (IoU, mAP_cf, DET_l and TOP_ll). These results establish state-of-the-art performance in centerline graph learning, offering new insights into generative models for this task.

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Beyond the Human-AI Binaries: Advanced Writers' Self-Directed Use of Generative AI in Academic Writing

This study explores the self-directed use of Generative AI (GAI) in academic writing among advanced L2 English writers, challenging assumptions that GAI undermines meaningful learning and holds less value for experienced learners. Through case studies, we investigate how three (post)doctoral writers engage with GAI to address specific L2 writing challenges. The findings revealed a spectrum of approaches to GAI, ranging from prescriptive to dialogic uses, with participants positioning AI as a tool versus an interactive participant in their meaning-making process, reflecting different views of AI as a mechanical system, social construct, or distributed agency. We highlight the ways AI disrupts traditional notions of authorship, text, and learning, showing how a poststructuralist lens allows us to transcend human-AI, writing-technology, and learning-bypassing binaries in our existing discourses on AI. This shifting view allows us to deconstruct and reconstruct AI's multifaceted possibilities in L2 writers' literacy practices. We also call for more nuanced ethical considerations to avoid stigmatizing L2 writers' use of GAI and to foster writerly virtues that reposition our relationship with AI technology.

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Secure Safety Filter Design for Sampled-data Nonlinear Systems under Sensor Spoofing Attacks

This paper presents a secure safety filter design for nonlinear systems under sensor spoofing attacks. Existing approaches primarily focus on linear systems which limits their applications in real-world scenarios. In this work, we extend these results to nonlinear systems in a principled way. We introduce exact observability maps that abstract specific state estimation algorithms and extend them to a secure version capable of handling sensor attacks. Our generalization also applies to the relaxed observability case, with slightly relaxed guarantees. More importantly, we propose a secure safety filter design in both exact and relaxed cases, which incorporates secure state estimation and a control barrier function-enabled safety filter. The proposed approach provides theoretical safety guarantees for nonlinear systems in the presence of sensor attacks. We numerically validate our analysis on a unicycle vehicle equipped with redundant yet partly compromised sensors.

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Secure Safety Filter: Towards Safe Flight Control under Sensor Attacks

Modern autopilot systems are prone to sensor attacks that can jeopardize flight safety. To mitigate this risk, we proposed a modular solution: the secure safety filter, which extends the well-established control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filter to account for, and mitigate, sensor attacks. This module consists of a secure state reconstructor (which generates plausible states) and a safety filter (which computes the safe control input that is closest to the nominal one). Differing from existing work focusing on linear, noise-free systems, the proposed secure safety filter handles bounded measurement noise and, by leveraging reduced-order model techniques, is applicable to the nonlinear dynamics of drones. Software-in-the-loop simulations and drone hardware experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the secure safety filter in rendering the system safe in the presence of sensor attacks.

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BEVWorld: A Multimodal World Simulator for Autonomous Driving via Scene-Level BEV Latents

World models have attracted increasing attention in autonomous driving for their ability to forecast potential future scenarios. In this paper, we propose BEVWorld, a novel framework that transforms multimodal sensor inputs into a unified and compact Bird's Eye View (BEV) latent space for holistic environment modeling. The proposed world model consists of two main components: a multi-modal tokenizer and a latent BEV sequence diffusion model. The multi-modal tokenizer first encodes heterogeneous sensory data, and its decoder reconstructs the latent BEV tokens into LiDAR and surround-view image observations via ray-casting rendering in a self-supervised manner. This enables joint modeling and bidirectional encoding-decoding of panoramic imagery and point cloud data within a shared spatial representation. On top of this, the latent BEV sequence diffusion model performs temporally consistent forecasting of future scenes, conditioned on high-level action tokens, enabling scene-level reasoning over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of BEVWorld on autonomous driving benchmarks, showcasing its capability in realistic future scene generation and its benefits for downstream tasks such as perception and motion prediction.

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Zero-Order Control Barrier Functions for Sampled-Data Systems with State and Input Dependent Safety Constraints

We propose a novel zero-order control barrier function (ZOCBF) for sampled-data systems to ensure system safety. Our formulation generalizes conventional control barrier functions and straightforwardly handles safety constraints with high-relative degrees or those that explicitly depend on both system states and inputs. The proposed ZOCBF condition does not require any differentiation operation. Instead, it involves computing the difference of the ZOCBF values at two consecutive sampling instants. We propose three numerical approaches to enforce the ZOCBF condition, tailored to different problem settings and available computational resources. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a collision avoidance example and a rollover prevention example on uneven terrains.

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Computationally Efficient Safe Control of Linear Systems under Severe Sensor Attacks

Cyber-physical systems are prone to sensor attacks that can compromise safety. A common approach to synthesizing controllers robust to sensor attacks is secure state reconstruction (SSR) -- but this is computationally expensive, hindering real-time control. In this paper, we take a safety-critical perspective on mitigating severe sensor attacks, leading to a computationally efficient solution. Namely, we design feedback controllers that ensure system safety by directly computing control actions from past input-output data. Instead of fully solving the SSR problem, we use conservative bounds on a control barrier function (CBF) condition, which we obtain by extending the recent eigendecomposition-based SSR approach to severe sensor attack settings. Additionally, we present an extended approach that solves a smaller-scale subproblem of the SSR problem, taking on some computational burden to mitigate the conservatism in the main approach. Numerical comparisons confirm that the traditional SSR approaches suffer from combinatorial issues, while our approach achieves safety guarantees with greater computational efficiency.

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A continuous-time violation-free multi-agent optimization algorithm and its applications to safe distributed control

In this work, we propose a continuous-time distributed optimization algorithm with guaranteed zero coupling constraint violation and apply it to safe distributed control in the presence of multiple control barrier functions (CBF). The optimization problem is defined over a network that collectively minimizes a separable cost function with coupled linear constraints. An equivalent optimization problem with auxiliary decision variables and a decoupling structure is proposed. A sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the subgradient information can be computed using local information. This then leads to a subgradient algorithm for updating the auxiliary variables. A case with sparse coupling constraints is further considered, and it is shown to have better memory and communication efficiency. For the specific case of a CBF-induced time-varying quadratic program (QP), an update law is proposed that achieves finite-time convergence. Numerical results involving a static resource allocation problem and a safe coordination problem for a multi-agent system demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

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LDMapNet-U: An End-to-End System for City-Scale Lane-Level Map Updating

An up-to-date city-scale lane-level map is an indispensable infrastructure and a key enabling technology for ensuring the safety and user experience of autonomous driving systems. In industrial scenarios, reliance on manual annotation for map updates creates a critical bottleneck. Lane-level updates require precise change information and must ensure consistency with adjacent data while adhering to strict standards. Traditional methods utilize a three-stage approach-construction, change detection, and updating-which often necessitates manual verification due to accuracy limitations. This results in labor-intensive processes and hampers timely updates. To address these challenges, we propose LDMapNet-U, which implements a new end-to-end paradigm for city-scale lane-level map updating. By reconceptualizing the update task as an end-to-end map generation process grounded in historical map data, we introduce a paradigm shift in map updating that simultaneously generates vectorized maps and change information. To achieve this, a Prior-Map Encoding (PME) module is introduced to effectively encode historical maps, serving as a critical reference for detecting changes. Additionally, we incorporate a novel Instance Change Prediction (ICP) module that learns to predict associations with historical maps. Consequently, LDMapNet-U simultaneously achieves vectorized map element generation and change detection. To demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of LDMapNet-U, extensive experiments are conducted using large-scale real-world datasets. In addition, LDMapNet-U has been successfully deployed in production at Baidu Maps since April 2024, supporting map updating for over 360 cities and significantly shortening the update cycle from quarterly to weekly. The updated maps serve hundreds of millions of users and are integrated into the autonomous driving systems of several leading vehicle companies.

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PointMamba: A Simple State Space Model for Point Cloud Analysis

Transformers have become one of the foundational architectures in point cloud analysis tasks due to their excellent global modeling ability. However, the attention mechanism has quadratic complexity, making the design of a linear complexity method with global modeling appealing. In this paper, we propose PointMamba, transferring the success of Mamba, a recent representative state space model (SSM), from NLP to point cloud analysis tasks. Unlike traditional Transformers, PointMamba employs a linear complexity algorithm, presenting global modeling capacity while significantly reducing computational costs. Specifically, our method leverages space-filling curves for effective point tokenization and adopts an extremely simple, non-hierarchical Mamba encoder as the backbone. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that PointMamba achieves superior performance across multiple datasets while significantly reducing GPU memory usage and FLOPs. This work underscores the potential of SSMs in 3D vision-related tasks and presents a simple yet effective Mamba-based baseline for future research. The code will be made available at \url{https://github.com/LMD0311/PointMamba}.

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TopoSD: Topology-Enhanced Lane Segment Perception with SDMap Prior

Recent advances in autonomous driving systems have shifted towards reducing reliance on high-definition maps (HDMaps) due to the huge costs of annotation and maintenance. Instead, researchers are focusing on online vectorized HDMap construction using on-board sensors. However, sensor-only approaches still face challenges in long-range perception due to the restricted views imposed by the mounting angles of onboard cameras, just as human drivers also rely on bird's-eye-view navigation maps for a comprehensive understanding of road structures. To address these issues, we propose to train the perception model to "see" standard definition maps (SDMaps). We encode SDMap elements into neural spatial map representations and instance tokens, and then incorporate such complementary features as prior information to improve the bird's eye view (BEV) feature for lane geometry and topology decoding. Based on the lane segment representation framework, the model simultaneously predicts lanes, centrelines and their topology. To further enhance the ability of geometry prediction and topology reasoning, we also use a topology-guided decoder to refine the predictions by exploiting the mutual relationships between topological and geometric features. We perform extensive experiments on OpenLane-V2 datasets to validate the proposed method. The results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, with gains of +6.7 and +9.1 on the mAP and topology metrics. Our analysis also reveals that models trained with SDMap noise augmentation exhibit enhanced robustness.

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Decoupled Pseudo-labeling for Semi-Supervised Monocular 3D Object Detection

We delve into pseudo-labeling for semi-supervised monocular 3D object detection (SSM3OD) and discover two primary issues: a misalignment between the prediction quality of 3D and 2D attributes and the tendency of depth supervision derived from pseudo-labels to be noisy, leading to significant optimization conflicts with other reliable forms of supervision. We introduce a novel decoupled pseudo-labeling (DPL) approach for SSM3OD. Our approach features a Decoupled Pseudo-label Generation (DPG) module, designed to efficiently generate pseudo-labels by separately processing 2D and 3D attributes. This module incorporates a unique homography-based method for identifying dependable pseudo-labels in BEV space, specifically for 3D attributes. Additionally, we present a DepthGradient Projection (DGP) module to mitigate optimization conflicts caused by noisy depth supervision of pseudo-labels, effectively decoupling the depth gradient and removing conflicting gradients. This dual decoupling strategy-at both the pseudo-label generation and gradient levels-significantly improves the utilization of pseudo-labels in SSM3OD. Our comprehensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches.

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