arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Correcting Learning-based Perception for Safety

The paper presents a two-step method to correct machine‑learning based perception for safety in autonomous systems. First, it uses offline computation to characterize uncertainties from the ML module via preimages of perception contracts. Then, at runtime, a risk heuristic selects specific states from these uncertain estimates to guide control decisions, reducing safety violations in adaptive cruise control scenarios while adding minimal delay.

By Yan Miao, Hussein Darir, Sayan Mitra
arXiv AI
2d ago

Traffic-VL: Reinforced Vision-Language Models for Generalizable End-to-End Traffic Signal Control

Traffic-VL introduces a vision‑language model that directly maps synchronized multi‑view images and natural‑language phase descriptions to traffic signal decisions, bypassing intermediate structured states. It is trained using SynTra‑V, a photorealistic simulation that generates surveillance imagery from physics‑based traffic models, and employs offline reinforcement learning to adapt its vision encoder before freezing it for online control. Experiments demonstrate that Traffic‑VL matches the performance of structured‑state controllers while outperforming image‑based and general‑purpose vision‑language models, and it generalizes robustly to unseen topologies, degraded sensing, real footage, and real‑world deployment across multiple intersections.

By Xingchen Zou, Maonan Wang, Kemou Jiang, Jie Li, Yiqi Chen, Xi Chen, Hai Yang, Yuxuan Liang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Closed-Loop Evaluation of Bird's-Eye-View Maps from Cross-View Transformers as Inputs to Behavior-Cloning Policies

The paper studies how Bird's‑Eye‑View (BEV) maps predicted by Cross‑View Transformers (CVT) can be used directly as inputs to a Behavior‑Cloning (BC) driving policy in the CARLA simulator. It introduces a six‑channel BEV representation and a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) weighting scheme to focus learning on underrepresented maneuvers. Closed‑loop tests show that the KDE‑weighted model is the only predicted‑BEV agent to finish an episode without infractions, highlighting that global segmentation scores are poor proxies for driving performance and that prediction quality at critical geometries, especially the route channel, is key to reliable navigation.

By Felipe Carlos dos Santos, Eric Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto