Yu, Zhiding
GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots
NVIDIA, null, Bjorck, Johan, Castañeda, Fernando, Cherniadev, Nikita, Da, Xingye, Ding, Runyu, Fan, Linxi "Jim", Fang, Yu, Fox, Dieter, Hu, Fengyuan, Huang, Spencer, Jang, Joel, Jiang, Zhenyu, Kautz, Jan, Kundalia, Kaushil, Lao, Lawrence, Li, Zhiqi, Lin, Zongyu, Lin, Kevin, Liu, Guilin, Llontop, Edith, Magne, Loic, Mandlekar, Ajay, Narayan, Avnish, Nasiriany, Soroush, Reed, Scott, Tan, You Liang, Wang, Guanzhi, Wang, Zu, Wang, Jing, Wang, Qi, Xiang, Jiannan, Xie, Yuqi, Xu, Yinzhen, Xu, Zhenjia, Ye, Seonghyeon, Yu, Zhiding, Zhang, Ao, Zhang, Hao, Zhao, Yizhou, Zheng, Ruijie, Zhu, Yuke
General-purpose robots need a versatile body and an intelligent mind. Recent advancements in humanoid robots have shown great promise as a hardware platform for building generalist autonomy in the human world. A robot foundation model, trained on massive and diverse data sources, is essential for enabling the robots to reason about novel situations, robustly handle real-world variability, and rapidly learn new tasks. To this end, we introduce GR00T N1, an open foundation model for humanoid robots. GR00T N1 is a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with a dual-system architecture. The vision-language module (System 2) interprets the environment through vision and language instructions. The subsequent diffusion transformer module (System 1) generates fluid motor actions in real time. Both modules are tightly coupled and jointly trained end-to-end. We train GR00T N1 with a heterogeneous mixture of real-robot trajectories, human videos, and synthetically generated datasets. We show that our generalist robot model GR00T N1 outperforms the state-of-the-art imitation learning baselines on standard simulation benchmarks across multiple robot embodiments. Furthermore, we deploy our model on the Fourier GR-1 humanoid robot for language-conditioned bimanual manipulation tasks, achieving strong performance with high data efficiency.
Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Training
Li, Zhenxin, Wang, Shihao, Lan, Shiyi, Yu, Zhiding, Wu, Zuxuan, Alvarez, Jose M.
End-to-end autonomous driving research currently faces a critical challenge in bridging the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop deployment. Current approaches are trained to predict trajectories in an open-loop environment, which struggle with quick reactions to other agents in closed-loop environments and risk generating kinematically infeasible plans due to the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving. In this paper, we introduce Hydra-NeXt, a novel multi-branch planning framework that unifies trajectory prediction, control prediction, and a trajectory refinement network in one model. Unlike current open-loop trajectory prediction models that only handle general-case planning, Hydra-NeXt further utilizes a control decoder to focus on short-term actions, which enables faster responses to dynamic situations and reactive agents. Moreover, we propose the Trajectory Refinement module to augment and refine the planning decisions by effectively adhering to kinematic constraints in closed-loop environments. This unified approach bridges the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving, demonstrating superior performance of 65.89 Driving Score (DS) and 48.20% Success Rate (SR) on the Bench2Drive dataset without relying on external experts for data collection. Hydra-NeXt surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 22.98 DS and 17.49 SR, marking a significant advancement in autonomous driving. Code will be available at https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/Hydra-NeXt.
Centaur: Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Test-Time Training
Sima, Chonghao, Chitta, Kashyap, Yu, Zhiding, Lan, Shiyi, Luo, Ping, Geiger, Andreas, Li, Hongyang, Alvarez, Jose M.
How can we rely on an end-to-end autonomous vehicle's complex decision-making system during deployment? One common solution is to have a ``fallback layer'' that checks the planned trajectory for rule violations and replaces it with a pre-defined safe action if necessary. Another approach involves adjusting the planner's decisions to minimize a pre-defined ``cost function'' using additional system predictions such as road layouts and detected obstacles. However, these pre-programmed rules or cost functions cannot learn and improve with new training data, often resulting in overly conservative behaviors. In this work, we propose Centaur (Cluster Entropy for Test-time trAining using Uncertainty) which updates a planner's behavior via test-time training, without relying on hand-engineered rules or cost functions. Instead, we measure and minimize the uncertainty in the planner's decisions. For this, we develop a novel uncertainty measure, called Cluster Entropy, which is simple, interpretable, and compatible with state-of-the-art planning algorithms. Using data collected at prior test-time time-steps, we perform an update to the model's parameters using a gradient that minimizes the Cluster Entropy. With only this sole gradient update prior to inference, Centaur exhibits significant improvements, ranking first on the navtest leaderboard with notable gains in safety-critical metrics such as time to collision. To provide detailed insights on a per-scenario basis, we also introduce navsafe, a challenging new benchmark, which highlights previously undiscovered failure modes of driving models.
Enhancing Autonomous Driving Safety with Collision Scenario Integration
Wang, Zi, Lan, Shiyi, Sun, Xinglong, Chang, Nadine, Li, Zhenxin, Yu, Zhiding, Alvarez, Jose M.
Autonomous vehicle safety is crucial for the successful deployment of self-driving cars. However, most existing planning methods rely heavily on imitation learning, which limits their ability to leverage collision data effectively. Moreover, collecting collision or near-collision data is inherently challenging, as it involves risks and raises ethical and practical concerns. In this paper, we propose SafeFusion, a training framework to learn from collision data. Instead of over-relying on imitation learning, SafeFusion integrates safety-oriented metrics during training to enable collision avoidance learning. In addition, to address the scarcity of collision data, we propose CollisionGen, a scalable data generation pipeline to generate diverse, high-quality scenarios using natural language prompts, generative models, and rule-based filtering. Experimental results show that our approach improves planning performance in collision-prone scenarios by 56\% over previous state-of-the-art planners while maintaining effectiveness in regular driving situations. Our work provides a scalable and effective solution for advancing the safety of autonomous driving systems.
RocketKV: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Two-Stage KV Cache Compression
Behnam, Payman, Fu, Yaosheng, Zhao, Ritchie, Tsai, Po-An, Yu, Zhiding, Tumanov, Alexey
Transformer-based Large Language Models rely critically on KV cache to efficiently handle extended contexts during the decode phase. Yet, the size of the KV cache grows proportionally with the input length, burdening both memory bandwidth and capacity as decoding progresses. To address this challenge, we present RocketKV, a training-free KV cache compression strategy designed specifically to reduce both memory bandwidth and capacity demand of KV cache during the decode phase. RocketKV contains two consecutive stages. In the first stage, it performs coarse-grain KV cache eviction on the input sequence tokens with SnapKV++, a method improved upon SnapKV by introducing adaptive pooling size and full compatibility with grouped-query attention. In the second stage, it adopts a hybrid attention method to conduct fine-grain top-k sparse attention, approximating the attention scores by leveraging both head and sequence dimensional reductions. Combining these two stages, RocketKV achieves significant KV cache fetching bandwidth and storage savings while maintaining comparable accuracy to full KV cache attention. We show that RocketKV provides end-to-end speedup by up to 3$\times$ as well as peak memory reduction by up to 31% in the decode phase on an NVIDIA H100 GPU compared to the full KV cache baseline, while achieving negligible accuracy loss on a variety of long-context tasks.
AIDE: Agentically Improve Visual Language Model with Domain Experts
Chiu, Ming-Chang, Liu, Fuxiao, Sapra, Karan, Tao, Andrew, Jacoob, Yaser, Ma, Xuezhe, Yu, Zhiding, Liu, Guilin
The enhancement of Visual Language Models (VLMs) has traditionally relied on knowledge distillation from larger, more capable models. This dependence creates a fundamental bottleneck for improving state-of-the-art systems, particularly when no superior models exist. We introduce AIDE (Agentic Improvement through Domain Experts), a novel framework that enables VLMs to autonomously enhance their capabilities by leveraging specialized domain expert models. AIDE operates through a four-stage process: (1) identifying instances for refinement, (2) engaging domain experts for targeted analysis, (3) synthesizing expert outputs with existing data, and (4) integrating enhanced instances into the training pipeline. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, including MMMU, MME, MMBench, etc., demonstrate AIDE's ability to achieve notable performance gains without relying on larger VLMs nor human supervision. Our framework provides a scalable, resource-efficient approach to continuous VLM improvement, addressing critical limitations in current methodologies, particularly valuable when larger models are unavailable to access.
Eagle 2: Building Post-Training Data Strategies from Scratch for Frontier Vision-Language Models
Li, Zhiqi, Chen, Guo, Liu, Shilong, Wang, Shihao, VS, Vibashan, Ji, Yishen, Lan, Shiyi, Zhang, Hao, Zhao, Yilin, Radhakrishnan, Subhashree, Chang, Nadine, Sapra, Karan, Deshmukh, Amala Sanjay, Rintamaki, Tuomas, Le, Matthieu, Karmanov, Ilia, Voegtle, Lukas, Fischer, Philipp, Huang, De-An, Roman, Timo, Lu, Tong, Alvarez, Jose M., Catanzaro, Bryan, Kautz, Jan, Tao, Andrew, Liu, Guilin, Yu, Zhiding
Recently, promising progress has been made by open-source vision-language models (VLMs) in bringing their capabilities closer to those of proprietary frontier models. However, most open-source models only publish their final model weights, leaving the critical details of data strategies and implementation largely opaque. In this work, we address VLM post-training from a data-centric perspective, showing the key role of data strategy in developing frontier VLMs. By studying and building our post-training data strategy from scratch, we share detailed insights into the development processes, aiming to benefit the development of competitive models for the open-source community. Our introduced data strategy, together with training recipes and model design, leads to a family of performant VLMs named Eagle2. Specifically, Eagle2-9B achieves state-of-the-art results across various multimodal benchmarks, matching certain competitive models with up to 70B parameters.
Exploring Camera Encoder Designs for Autonomous Driving Perception
Lakshmanan, Barath, Chen, Joshua, Lan, Shiyi, Shen, Maying, Yu, Zhiding, Alvarez, Jose M.
The cornerstone of autonomous vehicles (AV) is a solid perception system, where camera encoders play a crucial role. Existing works usually leverage pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Vision Transformers (ViTs) designed for general vision tasks, such as image classification, segmentation, and 2D detection. Although those well-known architectures have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in AV-related tasks, e.g., 3D Object Detection, there remains significant potential for improvement in network design due to the nuanced complexities of industrial-level AV dataset. Moreover, existing public AV benchmarks usually contain insufficient data, which might lead to inaccurate evaluation of those architectures.To reveal the AV-specific model insights, we start from a standard general-purpose encoder, ConvNeXt and progressively transform the design. We adjust different design parameters including width and depth of the model, stage compute ratio, attention mechanisms, and input resolution, supported by systematic analysis to each modifications. This customization yields an architecture optimized for AV camera encoder achieving 8.79% mAP improvement over the baseline. We believe our effort could become a sweet cookbook of image encoders for AV and pave the way to the next-level drive system.
Memorize What Matters: Emergent Scene Decomposition from Multitraverse
Li, Yiming, Wang, Zehong, Wang, Yue, Yu, Zhiding, Gojcic, Zan, Pavone, Marco, Feng, Chen, Alvarez, Jose M.
Humans naturally retain memories of permanent elements, while ephemeral moments often slip through the cracks of memory. This selective retention is crucial for robotic perception, localization, and mapping. To endow robots with this capability, we introduce 3D Gaussian Mapping (3DGM), a self-supervised, camera-only offline mapping framework grounded in 3D Gaussian Splatting. 3DGM converts multitraverse RGB videos from the same region into a Gaussian-based environmental map while concurrently performing 2D ephemeral object segmentation. Our key observation is that the environment remains consistent across traversals, while objects frequently change. This allows us to exploit self-supervision from repeated traversals to achieve environment-object decomposition. More specifically, 3DGM formulates multitraverse environmental mapping as a robust differentiable rendering problem, treating pixels of the environment and objects as inliers and outliers, respectively. Using robust feature distillation, feature residuals mining, and robust optimization, 3DGM jointly performs 2D segmentation and 3D mapping without human intervention. We build the Mapverse benchmark, sourced from the Ithaca365 and nuPlan datasets, to evaluate our method in unsupervised 2D segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and neural rendering. Extensive results verify the effectiveness and potential of our method for self-driving and robotics.
X-VILA: Cross-Modality Alignment for Large Language Model
Ye, Hanrong, Huang, De-An, Lu, Yao, Yu, Zhiding, Ping, Wei, Tao, Andrew, Kautz, Jan, Han, Song, Xu, Dan, Molchanov, Pavlo, Yin, Hongxu
We introduce X-VILA, an omni-modality model designed to extend the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating image, video, and audio modalities. By aligning modality-specific encoders with LLM inputs and diffusion decoders with LLM outputs, X-VILA achieves cross-modality understanding, reasoning, and generation. To facilitate this cross-modality alignment, we curate an effective interleaved any-to-any modality instruction-following dataset. Furthermore, we identify a significant problem with the current cross-modality alignment method, which results in visual information loss. To address the issue, we propose a visual alignment mechanism with a visual embedding highway module. We then introduce a resource-efficient recipe for training X-VILA, that exhibits proficiency in any-to-any modality conversation, surpassing previous approaches by large margins. X-VILA also showcases emergent properties across modalities even in the absence of similar training data. The project will be made open-source.