Personalized driving refers to an autonomous vehicle's ability to adapt its driving behavior or control strategies to match individual users' preferences and driving styles while maintaining safety and comfort standards. However, existing works either fail to capture every individual preference precisely or become computationally inefficient as the user base expands. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising solutions to this front through their natural language understanding and scene reasoning capabilities. In this work, we propose a lightweight yet effective on-board VLM framework that provides low-latency personalized driving performance while maintaining strong reasoning capabilities. Our solution incorporates a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based memory module that enables continuous learning of individual driving preferences through human feedback. Through comprehensive real-world vehicle deployment and experiments, our system has demonstrated the ability to provide safe, comfortable, and personalized driving experiences across various scenarios and significantly reduce takeover rates by up to 76.9%. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first end-to-end VLM-based motion control system in real-world autonomous vehicles.

With the broader usage and highly successful development of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a growth of interest and demand for applying LLMs to autonomous driving technology. Driven by their natural language understanding and reasoning ability, LLMs have the potential to enhance various aspects of autonomous driving systems, from perception and scene understanding to language interaction and decision-making. In this paper, we first introduce novel concepts and approaches to designing LLMs for autonomous driving (LLM4AD). Then, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the instruction-following abilities of LLMs within the autonomous driving domain. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments on both simulation and real-world vehicle platforms, thoroughly evaluating the performance and potential of our LLM4AD systems. Our research highlights the significant potential of LLMs to enhance various aspects of autonomous vehicle technology, from perception and scene understanding to language interaction and decision-making.

Wikipedia (Wiki) is one of the most widely used and publicly available resources for natural language processing (NLP) applications. Wikipedia Revision History (WikiRevHist) shows the order in which edits were made to any Wiki page since its first modification. While the most up-to-date Wiki has been widely used as a training source, WikiRevHist can also be valuable resources for NLP applications. However, there are insufficient tools available to process WikiRevHist without having substantial computing resources, making additional customization, and spending extra time adapting others' works. Therefore, we report Blocks Architecture (BloArk), an efficiency-focused data processing architecture that reduces running time, computing resource requirements, and repeated works in processing WikiRevHist dataset. BloArk consists of three parts in its infrastructure: blocks, segments, and warehouses. On top of that, we build the core data processing pipeline: builder and modifier. The BloArk builder transforms the original WikiRevHist dataset from XML syntax into JSON Lines (JSONL) format for improving the concurrent and storage efficiency. The BloArk modifier takes previously-built warehouses to operate incremental modifications for improving the utilization of existing databases and reducing the cost of reusing others' works. In the end, BloArk can scale up easily in both processing Wikipedia Revision History and incrementally modifying existing dataset for downstream NLP use cases. The source code, documentations, and example usages are publicly available online and open-sourced under GPL-2.0 license.

Content generation conditioning on users's readability is an important application for personalization. In an era of large language models (LLMs), readability-controlled text generation based on LLMs has become increasingly important. This paper introduces a novel methodology called "Readability-Controlled Instruction Learning (ReadCtrl)," which aims to instruction-tune LLMs to tailor users' readability levels. Unlike the traditional methods, which primarily focused on categorical readability adjustments typically classified as high, medium, and low or expert and layperson levels with limited success, ReadCtrl introduces a dynamic framework that enables LLMs to generate content at various (near continuous level) complexity levels, thereby enhancing their versatility across different applications. Our results show that the ReadCtrl-Mistral-7B models significantly outperformed strong baseline models such as GPT-4 and Claude-3, with a win rate of 52.1%:35.7% against GPT-4 in human evaluations. Furthermore, Read-Ctrl has shown significant improvements in automatic evaluations, as evidenced by better readability metrics (e.g., FOG, FKGL) and generation quality metrics (e.g., BLEU, SARI, SummaC-Factuality, UniEval-Consistency and Coherence). These results underscore Read-Ctrl's effectiveness and tenacity in producing high-quality, contextually appropriate outputs that closely align with targeted readability levels, marking a significant advancement in personalized content generation using LLMs.

Accurate prediction of agent motion trajectories is crucial for autonomous driving, contributing to the reduction of collision risks in human-vehicle interactions and ensuring ample response time for other traffic participants. Current research predominantly focuses on traditional deep learning methods, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). These methods leverage relative distances to forecast the motion trajectories of a single class of agents. However, in complex traffic scenarios, the motion patterns of various types of traffic participants exhibit inherent randomness and uncertainty. Relying solely on relative distances may not adequately capture the nuanced interaction patterns between different classes of road users. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-class trajectory prediction method named the social force embedded mixed graph convolutional network (SFEM-GCN). SFEM-GCN comprises three graph topologies: the semantic graph (SG), position graph (PG), and velocity graph (VG). These graphs encode various of social force relationships among different classes of agents in complex scenes. Specifically, SG utilizes one-hot encoding of agent-class information to guide the construction of graph adjacency matrices based on semantic information. PG and VG create adjacency matrices to capture motion interaction relationships between different classes agents. These graph structures are then integrated into a mixed graph, where learning is conducted using a spatiotemporal graph convolutional neural network (ST-GCNN). To further enhance prediction performance, we adopt temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to generate the predicted trajectory with fewer parameters. Experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate that SFEM-GCN surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness.

One critical bottleneck that impedes the development and deployment of autonomous transportation in open-pit mines is guaranteed robustness and trustworthiness in prohibitively extreme scenarios. In this research, a novel scenarios engineering (SE) methodology for the autonomous mining truck is proposed for open-pit mines. SE increases the trustworthiness and robustness of autonomous trucks from four key components: Scenario Feature Extractor, Intelligence & Index (I&I), Calibration & Certification (C&C), and Verification & Validation (V&V). Scenario feature extractor is a comprehensive pipeline approach that captures complex interactions and latent dependencies in complex mining scenarios. I&I effectively enhances the quality of the training dataset, thereby establishing a solid foundation for autonomous transportation in mining areas. C&C is grounded in the intrinsic regulation, capabilities, and contributions of the intelligent systems employed in autonomous transportation to align with traffic participants in the real world and ensure their performance through certification. V&V process ensures that the autonomous transportation system can be correctly implemented, while validation focuses on evaluating the ability of the well-trained model to operate efficiently in the complex and dynamic conditions of the open-pit mines. This methodology addresses the unique challenges of autonomous transportation in open-pit mining, promoting productivity, safety, and performance in mining operations.

Autonomous driving systems are increasingly popular in today's technological landscape, where vehicles with partial automation have already been widely available on the market, and the full automation era with "driverless" capabilities is near the horizon. However, accurately understanding humans' commands, particularly for autonomous vehicles that have only passengers instead of drivers, and achieving a high level of personalization remain challenging tasks in the development of autonomous driving systems. In this paper, we introduce a Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework Talk-to-Drive (Talk2Drive) to process verbal commands from humans and make autonomous driving decisions with contextual information, satisfying their personalized preferences for safety, efficiency, and comfort. First, a speech recognition module is developed for Talk2Drive to interpret verbal inputs from humans to textual instructions, which are then sent to LLMs for reasoning. Then, appropriate commands for the Electrical Control Unit (ECU) are generated, achieving a 100% success rate in executing codes. Real-world experiments show that our framework can substantially reduce the takeover rate for a diverse range of drivers by up to 90.1%. To the best of our knowledge, Talk2Drive marks the first instance of employing an LLM-based system in a real-world autonomous driving environment.

In recent years, significant achievements have been made in motion planning for intelligent vehicles. However, as a typical unstructured environment, open-pit mining attracts limited attention due to its complex operational conditions and adverse environmental factors. A comprehensive paradigm for unmanned transportation in open-pit mines is proposed in this research. Firstly, we propose a multi-task motion planning algorithm, called FusionPlanner, for autonomous mining trucks by the multi-sensor fusion method to adapt both lateral and longitudinal control tasks for unmanned transportation. Then, we develop a novel benchmark called MiningNav, which offers three validation approaches to evaluate the trustworthiness and robustness of well-trained algorithms in transportation roads of open-pit mines. Finally, we introduce the Parallel Mining Simulator (PMS), a new high-fidelity simulator specifically designed for open-pit mining scenarios. PMS enables the users to manage and control open-pit mine transportation from both the single-truck control and multi-truck scheduling perspectives. The performance of FusionPlanner is tested by MiningNav in PMS, and the empirical results demonstrate a significant reduction in the number of collisions and takeovers of our planner. We anticipate our unmanned transportation paradigm will bring mining trucks one step closer to trustworthiness and robustness in continuous round-the-clock unmanned transportation.

Patient portal allows discharged patients to access their personalized discharge instructions in electronic health records (EHRs). However, many patients have difficulty understanding or memorizing their discharge instructions. In this paper, we present PaniniQA, a patient-centric interactive question answering system designed to help patients understand their discharge instructions. PaniniQA first identifies important clinical content from patients' discharge instructions and then formulates patient-specific educational questions. In addition, PaniniQA is also equipped with answer verification functionality to provide timely feedback to correct patients' misunderstandings. Our comprehensive automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate our PaniniQA is capable of improving patients' mastery of their medical instructions through effective interactions

Intelligent vehicles (IVs) have gained worldwide attention due to their increased convenience, safety advantages, and potential commercial value. Despite predictions of commercial deployment by 2025, implementation remains limited to small-scale validation, with precise tracking controllers and motion planners being essential prerequisites for IVs. This paper reviews state-of-the-art motion planning methods for IVs, including pipeline planning and end-to-end planning methods. The study examines the selection, expansion, and optimization operations in a pipeline method, while it investigates training approaches and validation scenarios for driving tasks in end-to-end methods. Experimental platforms are reviewed to assist readers in choosing suitable training and validation strategies. A side-by-side comparison of the methods is provided to highlight their strengths and limitations, aiding system-level design choices. Current challenges and future perspectives are also discussed in this survey.