Is a 3D-Tokenized LLM the Key to Reliable Autonomous Driving?

Yifan Bai; Dongming Wu; Yingfei Liu; Fan Jia; Weixin Mao; Ziheng Zhang; Yucheng Zhao; Jianbing Shen; Xing Wei; Tiancai Wang; Xiangyu Zhang

arXiv · 2405.18361

Is a 3D-Tokenized LLM the Key to Reliable Autonomous Driving?

Yifan Bai·Dongming Wu·Yingfei Liu·Fan Jia·Weixin Mao·Ziheng Zhang·Yucheng Zhao·Jianbing Shen·Xing Wei·Tiancai Wang·Xiangyu Zhang

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Abstract

Rapid advancements in Autonomous Driving (AD) tasks turned a significant shift toward end-to-end fashion, particularly in the utilization of vision-language models (VLMs) that integrate robust logical reasoning and cognitive abilities to enable comprehensive end-to-end planning. However, these VLM-based approaches tend to integrate 2D vision tokenizers and a large language model (LLM) for ego-car planning, which lack 3D geometric priors as a cornerstone of reliable planning. Naturally, this observation raises a critical concern: Can a 2D-tokenized LLM accurately perceive the 3D environment? Our evaluation of current VLM-based methods across 3D object detection, vectorized map construction, and environmental caption suggests that the answer is, unfortunately, NO. In other words, 2D-tokenized LLM fails to provide reliable autonomous driving. In response, we introduce DETR-style 3D perceptrons as 3D tokenizers, which connect LLM with a one-layer linear projector. This simple yet elegant strategy, termed Atlas, harnesses the inherent priors of the 3D physical world, enabling it to simultaneously process high-resolution multi-view images and employ spatiotemporal modeling. Despite its simplicity, Atlas demonstrates superior performance in both 3D detection and ego planning tasks on nuScenes dataset, proving that 3D-tokenized LLM is the key to reliable autonomous driving. The code and datasets will be released.

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Yifan Bai, Dongming Wu, Yingfei Liu, Fan Jia, Weixin Mao, Ziheng Zhang, Yucheng Zhao, Jianbing Shen, Xing Wei, Tiancai Wang, Xiangyu Zhang. 2024-05-28. Is a 3D-Tokenized LLM the Key to Reliable Autonomous Driving?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18361

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