Driving simulation plays a crucial role in developing reliable driving agents by providing controlled, evaluative environments. To enable meaningful assessments, a high-quality driving simulator must satisfy several key requirements: multi-modal sensing capabilities (e.g., camera and LiDAR) with realistic scene rendering to minimize observational discrepancies; closed-loop evaluation to support free-form trajectory behaviors; highly diverse traffic scenarios for thorough evaluation; multi-agent cooperation to capture interaction dynamics; and high computational efficiency to ensure affordability and scalability. However, existing simulators and benchmarks fail to comprehensively meet these fundamental criteria. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces RealEngine, a novel driving simulation framework that holistically integrates 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis techniques to achieve realistic and flexible closed-loop simulation in the driving context. By leveraging real-world multi-modal sensor data, RealEngine reconstructs background scenes and foreground traffic participants separately, allowing for highly diverse and realistic traffic scenarios through flexible scene composition. This synergistic fusion of scene reconstruction and view synthesis enables photorealistic rendering across multiple sensor modalities, ensuring both perceptual fidelity and geometric accuracy. Building upon this environment, RealEngine supports three essential driving simulation categories: non-reactive simulation, safety testing, and multi-agent interaction, collectively forming a reliable and comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the real-world performance of driving agents.

TL;DR Perform 3D object editing selectively by disentangling it from the background scene. Instruct-NeRF2NeRF (in2n) is a promising method that enables editing of 3D scenes composed of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) using text prompts. However, it is challenging to perform geometrical modifications such as shrinking, scaling, or moving on both the background and object simultaneously. In this project, we enable geometrical changes of objects within the 3D scene by selectively editing the object after separating it from the scene. We perform object segmentation and background inpainting respectively, and demonstrate various examples of freely resizing or moving disentangled objects within the three-dimensional space.

Recent advancements in dialogue systems have highlighted the significance of integrating multimodal responses, which enable conveying ideas through diverse modalities rather than solely relying on text-based interactions. This enrichment not only improves overall communicative efficacy but also enhances the quality of conversational experiences. However, existing methods for dialogue-to-image retrieval face limitations due to the constraints of pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) in comprehending complex dialogues accurately. To address this, we present a novel approach leveraging the robust reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to generate precise dialogue-associated visual descriptors, facilitating seamless connection with images. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark data validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in deriving concise and accurate visual descriptors, leading to significant enhancements in dialogue-to-image retrieval performance. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate the method's generalizability across diverse visual cues, various LLMs, and different datasets, underscoring its practicality and potential impact in real-world applications.

Despite the successes of recent developments in visual AI, different shortcomings still exist; from missing exact logical reasoning, to abstract generalization abilities, to understanding complex and noisy scenes. Unfortunately, existing benchmarks, were not designed to capture more than a few of these aspects. Whereas deep learning datasets focus on visually complex data but simple visual reasoning tasks, inductive logic datasets involve complex logical learning tasks, however, lack the visual component. To address this, we propose the visual logical learning dataset, V-LoL, that seamlessly combines visual and logical challenges. Notably, we introduce the first instantiation of V-LoL, V-LoL-Trains, -- a visual rendition of a classic benchmark in symbolic AI, the Michalski train problem. By incorporating intricate visual scenes and flexible logical reasoning tasks within a versatile framework, V-LoL-Trains provides a platform for investigating a wide range of visual logical learning challenges. We evaluate a variety of AI systems including traditional symbolic AI, neural AI, as well as neuro-symbolic AI. Our evaluations demonstrate that even state-of-the-art AI faces difficulties in dealing with visual logical learning challenges, highlighting unique advantages and limitations specific to each methodology. Overall, V-LoL opens up new avenues for understanding and enhancing current abilities in visual logical learning for AI systems.

In many applications, machine learned (ML) models are required to hold some invariance qualities, such as rotation, size, intensity, and background invariance. Unlike many types of variance, the variants of background scenes cannot be ordered easily, which makes it difficult to analyze the robustness and biases of the models concerned. In this work, we present a technical solution for ordering background scenes according to their semantic proximity to a target image that contains a foreground object being tested. We make use of the results of object recognition as the semantic description of each image, and construct an ontology for storing knowledge about relationships among different objects using association analysis. This ontology enables (i) efficient and meaningful search for background scenes of different semantic distances to a target image, (ii) quantitative control of the distribution and sparsity of the sampled background scenes, and (iii) quality assurance using visual representations of invariance testing results (referred to as variance matrices). In this paper, we also report the training of an ML4ML assessor to evaluate the invariance quality of ML models automatically.