arXiv subjects

Yiyao Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Yiyao Zhu.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Dividing the Spoils: Strategic Prize Allocation in Team Contests

Rival teams compete through battles and reward members only after team victory. We study how team managers allocate victory-contingent reward budgets across players to maximize their teams' winning probabilities in a majoritarian contest. Under a regularity condition on battle technologies, the allocation game has a unique pure-strategy equilibrium. Despite differences in budgets and player costs across teams and technologies across battles, both managers choose the same normalized reward schedule, a property we call reward schedule alignment. Each battle's share is proportional to discriminatory power, closeness, and pivotality. With precommitted rewards, allocations and team-winning probabilities are independent of battle order.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

DLWM: Dual Latent World Models enable Holistic Gaussian-centric Pre-training in Autonomous Driving

Vision-based autonomous driving has gained much attention due to its low costs and excellent performance. Compared with dense BEV (Bird's Eye View) or sparse query models, Gaussian-centric method is a comprehensive yet sparse representation by describing scene with 3D semantic Gaussians. In this paper, we introduce DLWM, a novel paradigm with Dual Latent World Models specifically designed to enable holistic gaussian-centric pre-training in autonomous driving using two stages. In the first stage, DLWM predicts 3D Gaussians from queries by self-supervised reconstructing multi-view semantic and depth images. Equipped with fine-grained contextual features, in the second stage, two latent world models are trained separately for temporal feature learning, including Gaussian-flow-guided latent prediction for downstream occupancy perception and forecasting tasks, and ego-planning-guided latent prediction for motion planning. Extensive experiments in SurroundOcc and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM shows significant performance gains across Gaussian-centric 3D occupancy perception, 4D occupancy forecasting and motion planning tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

WPT: World-to-Policy Transfer via Online World Model Distillation

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in world models, which primarily aim to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between an agent's actions and the evolving environment. However, existing approaches often suffer from tight runtime coupling or depend on offline reward signals, resulting in substantial inference overhead or hindering end-to-end optimization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce WPT, a World-to-Policy Transfer training paradigm that enables online distillation under the guidance of an end-to-end world model. Specifically, we develop a trainable reward model that infuses world knowledge into a teacher policy by aligning candidate trajectories with the future dynamics predicted by the world model. Subsequently, we propose policy distillation and world reward distillation to transfer the teacher's reasoning ability into a lightweight student policy, enhancing planning performance while preserving real-time deployability. Extensive experiments on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks show that our WPT achieves state-of-the-art performance with a simple policy architecture: it attains a 0.11 collision rate (open-loop) and achieves a 79.23 driving score (closed-loop) surpassing both world-model-based and imitation-learning methods in accuracy and safety. Moreover, the student sustains up to 4.9x faster inference, while retaining most of the gains.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future

Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

SQS: Enhancing Sparse Perception Models via Query-based Splatting in Autonomous Driving

Sparse Perception Models (SPMs) adopt a query-driven paradigm that forgoes explicit dense BEV or volumetric construction, enabling highly efficient computation and accelerated inference. In this paper, we introduce SQS, a novel query-based splatting pre-training specifically designed to advance SPMs in autonomous driving. SQS introduces a plug-in module that predicts 3D Gaussian representations from sparse queries during pre-training, leveraging self-supervised splatting to learn fine-grained contextual features through the reconstruction of multi-view images and depth maps. During fine-tuning, the pre-trained Gaussian queries are seamlessly integrated into downstream networks via query interaction mechanisms that explicitly connect pre-trained queries with task-specific queries, effectively accommodating the diverse requirements of occupancy prediction and 3D object detection. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that SQS delivers considerable performance gains across multiple query-based 3D perception tasks, notably in occupancy prediction and 3D object detection, outperforming prior state-of-the-art pre-training approaches by a significant margin (i.e., +1.3 mIoU on occupancy prediction and +1.0 NDS on 3D detection).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

VisionPAD: A Vision-Centric Pre-training Paradigm for Autonomous Driving

This paper introduces VisionPAD, a novel self-supervised pre-training paradigm designed for vision-centric algorithms in autonomous driving. In contrast to previous approaches that employ neural rendering with explicit depth supervision, VisionPAD utilizes more efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct multi-view representations using only images as supervision. Specifically, we introduce a self-supervised method for voxel velocity estimation. By warping voxels to adjacent frames and supervising the rendered outputs, the model effectively learns motion cues in the sequential data. Furthermore, we adopt a multi-frame photometric consistency approach to enhance geometric perception. It projects adjacent frames to the current frame based on rendered depths and relative poses, boosting the 3D geometric representation through pure image supervision. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that VisionPAD significantly improves performance in 3D object detection, occupancy prediction and map segmentation, surpassing state-of-the-art pre-training strategies by a considerable margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

SOT-MRAM-Enabled Probabilistic Binary Neural Networks for Noise-Tolerant and Fast Training

We report the use of spin-orbit torque (SOT) magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) to implement a probabilistic binary neural network (PBNN) for resource-saving applications. The in-plane magnetized SOT (i-SOT) MRAM not only enables field-free magnetization switching with high endurance (> 10^11), but also hosts multiple stable probabilistic states with a low device-to-device variation (< 6.35%). Accordingly, the proposed PBNN outperforms other neural networks by achieving an 18* increase in training speed, while maintaining an accuracy above 97% under the write and read noise perturbations. Furthermore, by applying the binarization process with an additional SOT-MRAM dummy module, we demonstrate an on-chip MNIST inference performance close to the ideal baseline using our SOT-PBNN hardware.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2023

BiFF: Bi-level Future Fusion with Polyline-based Coordinate for Interactive Trajectory Prediction

Predicting future trajectories of surrounding agents is essential for safety-critical autonomous driving. Most existing work focuses on predicting marginal trajectories for each agent independently. However, it has rarely been explored in predicting joint trajectories for interactive agents. In this work, we propose Bi-level Future Fusion (BiFF) to explicitly capture future interactions between interactive agents. Concretely, BiFF fuses the high-level future intentions followed by low-level future behaviors. Then the polyline-based coordinate is specifically designed for multi-agent prediction to ensure data efficiency, frame robustness, and prediction accuracy. Experiments show that BiFF achieves state-of-the-art performance on the interactive prediction benchmark of Waymo Open Motion Dataset.

cs.RO↗