To enable AI agents to interact seamlessly with both humans and 3D environments, they must not only perceive the 3D world accurately but also align human language with 3D spatial representations. While prior work has made significant progress by integrating language features into geometrically detailed 3D scene representations using 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS), these approaches rely on computationally intensive offline preprocessing of language features for each input image, limiting adaptability to new environments. In this work, we introduce Online Language Splatting, the first framework to achieve online, near real-time, open-vocabulary language mapping within a 3DGS-SLAM system without requiring pre-generated language features. The key challenge lies in efficiently fusing high-dimensional language features into 3D representations while balancing the computation speed, memory usage, rendering quality and open-vocabulary capability. To this end, we innovatively design: (1) a high-resolution CLIP embedding module capable of generating detailed language feature maps in 18ms per frame, (2) a two-stage online auto-encoder that compresses 768-dimensional CLIP features to 15 dimensions while preserving open-vocabulary capabilities, and (3) a color-language disentangled optimization approach to improve rendering quality. Experimental results show that our online method not only surpasses the state-of-the-art offline methods in accuracy but also achieves more than 40x efficiency boost, demonstrating the potential for dynamic and interactive AI applications.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative visual analytics systems has transformed data-driven insights, yet significant challenges persist in accurately interpreting users' analytical and interaction intents. While language inputs offer flexibility, they often lack precision, making the expression of complex intents inefficient, error-prone, and time-intensive. To address these limitations, we investigate the design space of multimodal interactions for generative visual analytics through a literature review and pilot brainstorming sessions. Building on these insights, we introduce a highly extensible workflow that integrates multiple LLM agents for intent inference and visualization generation. We develop InterChat, a generative visual analytics system that combines direct manipulation of visual elements with natural language inputs. This integration enables precise intent communication and supports progressive, visually driven exploratory data analyses. By employing effective prompt engineering, and contextual interaction linking, alongside intuitive visualization and interaction designs, InterChat bridges the gap between user interactions and LLM-driven visualizations, enhancing both interpretability and usability. Extensive evaluations, including two usage scenarios, a user study, and expert feedback, demonstrate the effectiveness of InterChat. Results show significant improvements in the accuracy and efficiency of handling complex visual analytics tasks, highlighting the potential of multimodal interactions to redefine user engagement and analytical depth in generative visual analytics.

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations play a crucial role in autonomous driving tasks. Despite recent advancements in BEV generation, inherent noise, stemming from sensor limitations and the learning process, remains largely unaddressed, resulting in suboptimal BEV representations that adversely impact the performance of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose BEVDiffuser, a novel diffusion model that effectively denoises BEV feature maps using the ground-truth object layout as guidance. BEVDiffuser can be operated in a plug-and-play manner during training time to enhance existing BEV models without requiring any architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate BEVDiffuser's exceptional denoising and generation capabilities, which enable significant enhancement to existing BEV models, as evidenced by notable improvements of 12.3\% in mAP and 10.1\% in NDS achieved for 3D object detection without introducing additional computational complexity. Moreover, substantial improvements in long-tail object detection and under challenging weather and lighting conditions further validate BEVDiffuser's effectiveness in denoising and enhancing BEV representations.

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving as it enables comprehensive understanding of connectivity and relationships between lanes and traffic elements. While recent approaches have shown success in perceiving driving topology using vehicle-mounted sensors, their scalability is hindered by the reliance on training data captured by consistent sensor configurations. We identify that the key factor in scalable lane perception and topology reasoning is the elimination of this sensor-dependent feature. To address this, we propose SMART, a scalable solution that leverages easily available standard-definition (SD) and satellite maps to learn a map prior model, supervised by large-scale geo-referenced high-definition (HD) maps independent of sensor settings. Attributed to scaled training, SMART alone achieves superior offline lane topology understanding using only SD and satellite inputs. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that SMART can be seamlessly integrated into any online topology reasoning methods, yielding significant improvements of up to 28% on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark.

World model based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomous driving, which learns a latent dynamics model and uses it to train a planning policy. To speed up the learning process, the pretrain-finetune paradigm is often used, where online RL is initialized by a pretrained model and a policy learned offline. However, naively performing such initialization in RL may result in dramatic performance degradation during the online interactions in the new task. To tackle this challenge, we first analyze the performance degradation and identify two primary root causes therein: the mismatch of the planning policy and the mismatch of the dynamics model, due to distribution shift. We further analyze the effects of these factors on performance degradation during finetuning, and our findings reveal that the choice of finetuning strategies plays a pivotal role in mitigating these effects. We then introduce AdaWM, an Adaptive World Model based planning method, featuring two key steps: (a) mismatch identification, which quantifies the mismatches and informs the finetuning strategy, and (b) alignment-driven finetuning, which selectively updates either the policy or the model as needed using efficient low-rank updates. Extensive experiments on the challenging CARLA driving tasks demonstrate that AdaWM significantly improves the finetuning process, resulting in more robust and efficient performance in autonomous driving systems. Automated vehicles (AVs) are poised to revolutionize future mobility systems with enhanced safety and efficiency Yurtsever et al. (2020); Kalra & Paddock (2016); Maurer et al. (2016). Despite significant progress Teng et al. (2023); Hu et al. (2023); Jiang et al. (2023), developing AVs capable of navigating complex, diverse real-world scenarios remains challenging, particularly in unforeseen situations Campbell et al. (2010); Chen et al. (2024). Autonomous vehicles must learn the complex dynamics of environments, predict future scenarios accurately and swiftly, and take timely actions such as emergency braking. Thus motivated, in this work, we devise adaptive world model to advance embodied AI and improve the planning capability of autonomous driving systems. World model (WM) based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach for autonomous driving Chen et al. (2024); Wang et al. (2024); Guan et al. (2024); Li et al. (2024).

Online mapping reduces the reliance of autonomous vehicles on high-definition (HD) maps, significantly enhancing scalability. However, recent advancements often overlook cross-sensor configuration generalization, leading to performance degradation when models are deployed on vehicles with different camera intrinsics and extrinsics. With the rapid evolution of novel view synthesis methods, we investigate the extent to which these techniques can be leveraged to address the sensor configuration generalization challenge. We propose a novel framework leveraging Gaussian splatting to reconstruct scenes and render camera images in target sensor configurations. The target config sensor data, along with labels mapped to the target config, are used to train online mapping models. Our proposed framework on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets demonstrates a performance improvement of 18% through effective dataset augmentation, achieves faster convergence and efficient training, and exceeds state-of-the-art performance when using only 25% of the original training data. This enables data reuse and reduces the need for laborious data labeling. Project page at https://henryzhangzhy.github.io/mapgs.

While recent depth estimation methods exhibit strong zero-shot generalization, achieving accurate metric depth across diverse camera types-particularly those with large fields of view (FoV) such as fisheye and 360-degree cameras-remains a significant challenge. This paper presents Depth Any Camera (DAC), a powerful zero-shot metric depth estimation framework that extends a perspective-trained model to effectively handle cameras with varying FoVs. The framework is designed to ensure that all existing 3D data can be leveraged, regardless of the specific camera types used in new applications. Remarkably, DAC is trained exclusively on perspective images but generalizes seamlessly to fisheye and 360-degree cameras without the need for specialized training data. DAC employs Equi-Rectangular Projection (ERP) as a unified image representation, enabling consistent processing of images with diverse FoVs. Its key components include a pitch-aware Image-to-ERP conversion for efficient online augmentation in ERP space, a FoV alignment operation to support effective training across a wide range of FoVs, and multi-resolution data augmentation to address resolution disparities between training and testing. DAC achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot metric depth estimation, improving delta-1 ($\delta_1$) accuracy by up to 50% on multiple fisheye and 360-degree datasets compared to prior metric depth foundation models, demonstrating robust generalization across camera types.

Cloud robotics enables robots to offload complex computational tasks to cloud servers for performance and ease of management. However, cloud compute can be costly, cloud services can suffer occasional downtime, and connectivity between the robot and cloud can be prone to variations in network Quality-of-Service (QoS). We present FogROS2-FT (Fault Tolerant) to mitigate these issues by introducing a multi-cloud extension that automatically replicates independent stateless robotic services, routes requests to these replicas, and directs the first response back. With replication, robots can still benefit from cloud computations even when a cloud service provider is down or there is low QoS. Additionally, many cloud computing providers offer low-cost spot computing instances that may shutdown unpredictably. Normally, these low-cost instances would be inappropriate for cloud robotics, but the fault tolerance nature of FogROS2-FT allows them to be used reliably. We demonstrate FogROS2-FT fault tolerance capabilities in 3 cloud-robotics scenarios in simulation (visual object detection, semantic segmentation, motion planning) and 1 physical robot experiment (scan-pick-and-place). Running on the same hardware specification, FogROS2-FT achieves motion planning with up to 2.2x cost reduction and up to a 5.53x reduction on 99 Percentile (P99) long-tail latency. FogROS2-FT reduces the P99 long-tail latency of object detection and semantic segmentation by 2.0x and 2.1x, respectively, under network slowdown and resource contention.

Bird's eye view (BEV)-based 3D perception plays a crucial role in autonomous driving applications. The rise of large language models has spurred interest in BEV-based captioning to understand object behavior in the surrounding environment. However, existing approaches treat perception and captioning as separate tasks, focusing on the performance of only one of the tasks and overlooking the potential benefits of multimodal alignment. To bridge this gap between modalities, we introduce MTA, a novel multimodal task alignment framework that boosts both BEV perception and captioning. MTA consists of two key components: (1) BEV-Language Alignment (BLA), a contextual learning mechanism that aligns the BEV scene representations with ground-truth language representations, and (2) Detection-Captioning Alignment (DCA), a cross-modal prompting mechanism that aligns detection and captioning outputs. MTA integrates into state-of-the-art baselines during training, adding no extra computational complexity at runtime. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and TOD3Cap datasets show that MTA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 4.9% improvement in perception and a 9.2% improvement in captioning. These results underscore the effectiveness of unified alignment in reconciling BEV-based perception and captioning.

Cloud robotics enables robots to offload computationally intensive tasks to cloud servers for performance, cost, and ease of management. However, the network and cloud computing infrastructure are not designed for reliable timing guarantees, due to fluctuating Quality-of-Service (QoS). In this work, we formulate an impossibility triangle theorem for: Latency reliability, Singleton server, and Commodity hardware. The LSC theorem suggests that providing replicated servers with uncorrelated failures can exponentially reduce the probability of missing a deadline. We present FogROS2-Probabilistic Latency Reliability (PLR) that uses multiple independent network interfaces to send requests to replicated cloud servers and uses the first response back. We design routing mechanisms to discover, connect, and route through non-default network interfaces on robots. FogROS2-PLR optimizes the selection of interfaces to servers to minimize the probability of missing a deadline. We conduct a cloud-connected driving experiment with two 5G service providers, demonstrating FogROS2-PLR effectively provides smooth service quality even if one of the service providers experiences low coverage and base station handover. We use 99 Percentile (P99) latency to evaluate anomalous long-tail latency behavior. In one experiment, FogROS2-PLR improves P99 latency by up to 3.7x compared to using one service provider. We deploy FogROS2-PLR on a physical Stretch 3 robot performing an indoor human-tracking task. Even in a fully covered Wi-Fi and 5G environment, FogROS2-PLR improves the responsiveness of the robot reducing mean latency by 36% and P99 latency by 33%.