Recent advances in inference-time scaling, particularly those leveraging reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, have substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Inspired by this success, similar strategies have been applied to multimodal reasoning, yet their impact on visual perception remains unclear. To investigate this gap, we introduce DisTANCE, a perception-centric benchmark for visual estimation tasks. Evaluation results show that LVLMs exhibit limited estimation precision, and inference-time scaling offers only marginal gains. We attribute this to the fast perception paradigm of current LVLMs, where visual understanding is treated as a one-shot output without modeling the underlying perceptual process. To address this, we propose Perception-Time Scaling (PTS), a novel paradigm that encourages token-rich perception and decomposes complex perception problems into intermediate tractable sub-problems, thereby enabling perception to align with and benefit from inference-time scaling. Combined with reinforcement learning techniques, PTS significantly improves perception accuracy, raising high-precision performance on DisTANCE from 8.0% to 64.7%, and generalizes well to out-of-domain tasks. Surprisingly, even though PTS data are purely synthetic, combining them with math reasoning data yields consistent gains in both reasoning and real-world perception benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that PTS introduces more perception-related tokens and increases the model's attention to image tokens. Our code and data will be publicly released.

With the rapid growth of the aviation industry, there is a need for a large number of flight crew. How to select the right pilots in a cost-efficient manner has become an important research question. In the current study, twenty-three pilots were recruited from China Eastern Airlines, and 23 novices were from the community of Tsinghua University. A novel approach incorporating machine learning and virtual reality technology was applied to distinguish features between these participants with different flight skills. Results indicate that SVM with the MIC feature selection method consistently achieved the highest prediction performance on all metrics with an Accuracy of 0.93, an AUC of 0.96, and an F1 of 0.93, which outperforms four other classifier algorithms and two other feature selection methods. From the perspective of feature selection methods, the MIC method can select features with a nonlinear relationship to sampling labels, instead of a simple filter-out. Our new implementation of the SVM + MIC algorithm outperforms all existing pilot selection algorithms and perhaps provides the first implementation based on eye tracking and flight dynamics data. This study's VR simulation platforms and algorithms can be used for pilot selection and training.

Routing is a crucial step in the VLSI design flow. With the advancement of manufacturing technologies, more constraints have emerged in design rules, particularly regarding obstacles during routing, leading to increased routing complexity. Unfortunately, many global routers struggle to efficiently generate obstacle-free solutions due to the lack of scalable obstacle-avoiding tree generation methods and the capability of handling modern designs with complex obstacles and nets. In this work, we propose an efficient obstacle-aware global routing flow for VLSI designs with obstacles. The flow includes a rule-based obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (OARSMT) algorithm during the tree generation phase. This algorithm is both scalable and fast to provide tree topologies avoiding obstacles in the early stage globally. With its guidance, OARSMT-guided and obstacle-aware sparse maze routing are proposed in the later stages to minimize obstacle violations further and reduce overflow costs. Compared to advanced methods on the benchmark with obstacles, our approach successfully eliminates obstacle violations, and reduces wirelength and overflow cost, while sacrificing only a limited number of via counts and runtime overhead.

This study developed an algorithm capable of detecting a reference line (a 0.2 mm thick piano wire) to accurately determine the position of an automated installation robot within an elevator shaft. A total of 3,245 images were collected from the experimental tower of H Company, the leading elevator manufacturer in South Korea, and the detection performance was evaluated using four experimental approaches (GCH, GSCH, GECH, FCH). During the initial image processing stage, Gaussian blurring, sharpening filter, embossing filter, and Fourier Transform were applied, followed by Canny Edge Detection and Hough Transform. Notably, the method was developed to accurately extract the reference line by averaging the x-coordinates of the lines detected through the Hough Transform. This approach enabled the detection of the 0.2 mm thick piano wire with high accuracy, even in the presence of noise and other interfering factors (e.g., concrete cracks inside the elevator shaft or safety bars for filming equipment). The experimental results showed that Experiment 4 (FCH), which utilized Fourier Transform in the preprocessing stage, achieved the highest detection rate for the LtoL, LtoR, and RtoL datasets. Experiment 2(GSCH), which applied Gaussian blurring and a sharpening filter, demonstrated superior detection performance on the RtoR dataset. This study proposes a reference line detection algorithm that enables precise position calculation and control of automated robots in elevator shaft installation. Moreover, the developed method shows potential for applicability even in confined working spaces. Future work aims to develop a line detection algorithm equipped with machine learning-based hyperparameter tuning capabilities.

Autonomous racing presents a complex environment requiring robust controllers capable of making rapid decisions under dynamic conditions. While traditional controllers based on tire models are reliable, they often demand extensive tuning or system identification. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods offer significant potential due to their ability to learn directly from interaction, yet they typically suffer from the sim-to-real gap, where policies trained in simulation fail to perform effectively in the real world. In this paper, we propose RLPP, a residual RL framework that enhances a Pure Pursuit (PP) controller with an RL-based residual. This hybrid approach leverages the reliability and interpretability of PP while using RL to fine-tune the controller's performance in real-world scenarios. Extensive testing on the F1TENTH platform demonstrates that RLPP improves lap times of the baseline controllers by up to 6.37 %, closing the gap to the State-of-the-Art methods by more than 52 % and providing reliable performance in zero-shot real-world deployment, overcoming key challenges associated with the sim-to-real transfer and reducing the performance gap from simulation to reality by more than 8-fold when compared to the baseline RL controller. The RLPP framework is made available as an open-source tool, encouraging further exploration and advancement in autonomous racing research. The code is available at: www.github.com/forzaeth/rlpp.

To tackle the twin challenges of limited battery life and lengthy charging durations in electric vehicles (EVs), this paper introduces an Energy-efficient Hybrid Model Predictive Planner (EHMPP), which employs an energy-saving optimization strategy. EHMPP focuses on refining the design of the motion planner to be seamlessly integrated with the existing automatic driving algorithms, without additional hardware. It has been validated through simulation experiments on the Prescan, CarSim, and Matlab platforms, demonstrating that it can increase passive recovery energy by 11.74\% and effectively track motor speed and acceleration at optimal power. To sum up, EHMPP not only aids in trajectory planning but also significantly boosts energy efficiency in autonomous EVs.

The development of autonomous driving has boosted the research on autonomous racing. However, existing local trajectory planning methods have difficulty planning trajectories with optimal velocity profiles at racetracks with sharp corners, thus weakening the performance of autonomous racing. To address this problem, we propose a local trajectory planning method that integrates Velocity Prediction based on Model Predictive Contour Control (VPMPCC). The optimal parameters of VPMPCC are learned through Bayesian Optimization (BO) based on a proposed novel Objective Function adapted to Racing (OFR). Specifically, VPMPCC achieves velocity prediction by encoding the racetrack as a reference velocity profile and incorporating it into the optimization problem. This method optimizes the velocity profile of local trajectories, especially at corners with significant curvature. The proposed OFR balances racing performance with vehicle safety, ensuring safe and efficient BO training. In the simulation, the number of training iterations for OFR-based BO is reduced by 42.86% compared to the state-of-the-art method. The optimal simulation-trained parameters are then applied to a real-world F1TENTH vehicle without retraining. During prolonged racing on a custom-built racetrack featuring significant sharp corners, the mean velocity of VPMPCC reaches 93.18% of the vehicle's handling limits. The released code is available at https://github.com/zhouhengli/VPMPCC.

High-definition road maps play a crucial role in the functionality and verification of highly automated driving functions. These contain precise information about the road network, geometry, condition, as well as traffic signs. Despite their importance for the development and evaluation of driving functions, the generation of high-definition maps is still an ongoing research topic. While previous work in this area has primarily focused on the accuracy of road geometry, we present a novel approach for automated large-scale map generation for use in industrial applications. Our proposed method leverages a minimal number of external information about the road to process LiDAR data in segments. These segments are subsequently combined, enabling a flexible and scalable process that achieves high-definition accuracy. Additionally, we showcase the use of the resulting OpenDRIVE in driving function simulation.

Abstract-- High-resolution road representations are a key factor for the success of (highly) automated driving functions. These representations, for example, high-definition (HD) maps, contain accurate information on a multitude of factors, among others: road geometry, lane information, and traffic signs. Through the growing complexity and functionality of automated driving functions, also the requirements on testing and evaluation grow continuously. This leads to an increasing interest in virtual test drives for evaluation purposes. As roads play a crucial role in traffic flow, accurate real-world representations are needed, especially when deriving realistic driving behavior data. This paper proposes a novel approach to generate realistic road representations based solely on point cloud information, independent of the LiDAR sensor, mounting position, and without the need for odometry data, multi-sensor fusion, machine learning, or highly-accurate calibration. As the primary use case is simulation, we use the OpenDRIVE format for evaluation.

Existing approaches to trajectory planning for autonomous racing employ sampling-based methods, generating numerous jerk-optimal trajectories and selecting the most favorable feasible trajectory based on a cost function penalizing deviations from an offline-calculated racing line. While successful on oval tracks, these methods face limitations on complex circuits due to the simplistic geometry of jerk-optimal edges failing to capture the complexity of the racing line. Additionally, they only consider two-dimensional tracks, potentially neglecting or surpassing the actual dynamic potential. In this paper, we present a sampling-based local trajectory planning approach for autonomous racing that can maintain the lap time of the racing line even on complex race tracks and consider the race track's three-dimensional effects. In simulative experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves lower lap times and improved utilization of dynamic limits compared to existing approaches. We also investigate the impact of online racing line generation, in which the time-optimal solution is planned from the current vehicle state for a limited spatial horizon, in contrast to a closed racing line calculated offline. We show that combining the sampling-based planner with the online racing line generation can significantly reduce lap times in multi-vehicle scenarios.