t-READi: Transformer-Powered Robust and Efficient Multimodal Inference for Autonomous Driving

Engineering notes

Key topics: autonomous driving, autonomous vehicle, lidar, radar, perception. See the paper for implementation details and experimental results.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Given the wide adoption of multimodal sensors (e.g., camera, lidar, radar) by autonomous vehicles (AVs), deep analytics to fuse their outputs for a robust perception become imperative. However, existing fusion methods often make two assumptions rarely holding in practice: i) similar data distributions for all inputs and ii) constant availability for all sensors. Because, for example, lidars have various resolutions and failures of radars may occur, such variability often results in significant performance degradation in fusion. To this end, we present t-READi, an adaptive inference system that accommodates the variability of multimodal sensory data and thus enables robust and efficient perception. t-READi identifies variation-sensitive yet structure-specific model parameters; it then adapts only these parameters while keeping the rest intact. t-READi also leverages a cross-modality contrastive learning method to compensate for the loss from missing modalities. Both functions are implemented to maintain compatibility with existing multimodal deep fusion methods. The extensive experiments evidently demonstrate that compared with the status quo approaches, t-READi not only improves the average inference accuracy by more than 6% but also reduces the inference latency by almost 15× with the cost of only 5% extra memory overhead in the worst case under realistic data and modal variations.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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