Papers for

advanced driver assistance system developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Autonomous racecar adapts control for overtaking and stability

Driving Context-guided Model Predictive Planning and Control for Autonomous Car Racing at the Limit and Beyond

Abstract: This paper presents a Model Predictive Control-based motion planning and control pipeline for autonomous car racing capable of adapting to different driving contexts, such as overtaking, nominal driving, and countersteering. A Cost Blending state machine manages the identification of different driving contexts and the selection of their predefined weights to be applied to the Model Predictive Planning (MPP) and Control (MPC) modules. The two optimization-based solutions share the same problem formulation and model, differing only in horizon length, rate, tuning, and in their open-loop versus closed-loop approach to maximize the effectiveness of their interaction. The work is validated on the fully autonomous open-wheel racecar Superformula EAV-25, with a lap time achieved that is within 2% of the best human driver reference. The results demonstrate the capability of the solution in driving at the limit of handling, smoothly executing overtaking maneuvers, and quickly reacting to high oversteering conditions to recover the vehicle stability.

Fri 11 SeptRobotics
The gist
Driving a racecar autonomously at high speed is very challenging because the car needs to make quick decisions depending on what’s happening on the track. The authors designed a system that can switch between different driving styles, such as normal driving, overtaking other cars, or recovering from slippery turns. Their approach uses a planning and control method that looks ahead and adjusts the car's motions accordingly. They tested their method on a real racecar and got lap times almost as fast as the best human drivers, proving the system can handle tough driving scenarios smoothly.
Open 2609.12660v1

Driver gaze prediction improves during tracker loss using context and scene data

Context-Aware Causal Gaze Forecasting for Human-Vehicle Interaction During In-Cabin Tracking Dropouts

Abstract: Dashboard-mounted gaze trackers often lose sight of the driver's eyes during large head rotations, including shoulder checks, mirror glances, and intersection scanning. These maneuvers occur when information about the driver's visual attention is most useful. Offline gap-filling methods may reconstruct a missing interval using observations from both sides, but an online driver-monitoring system cannot rely on measurements that have not yet occurred. We therefore formulate causal gaze recovery: forecasting unavailable gaze at time t without target-tracker gaze at t or later. We introduce the Causal Context-Gated Forecaster (CCGF), which encodes a 60-frame pre-dropout history of gaze and head pose and combines it with DINOv3 scene features. A learned reliability gate controls the contribution of the history and scene representations as the dropout progresses. We evaluate two scene conditions: Live, in which the scene representation continues to update during tracker loss, and Frozen, in which the final pre-dropout representation is used throughout the missing interval. We evaluate CCGF on 2,047 eligible, naturally occurring GazeSense head\_lost events drawn from 10.5 h of naturalistic driving by ten drivers. Across all recordings, head\_lost accounts for 8.5 percent of GazeSense recording time. Synchronized gaze coordinates from a head-mounted Neon tracker provide supervision and evaluation targets but are never used as model inputs. Under leave-one-driver-out evaluation, CCGF achieves a mean per-driver median error of 175.7 px (10.5 deg) with Live scene updates, a 33 percent reduction relative to history-only causal forecasting. With Frozen scene input, the error increases to 210.8 px (12.9 deg), indicating that scene observations acquired during the dropout provide useful predictive information. We will release the dataset, evaluation protocol, and causal baselines.

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Sometimes, devices that track where a driver is looking stop working when the driver turns their head sharply, like when checking mirrors. This is a problem because knowing where the driver is looking at those moments is important for safety. The authors created a way to predict the driver's gaze during these tracker dropouts by looking at recent head and gaze movements and what the driver might be seeing around them. Their approach uses real driving data and shows better accuracy when it updates with what the driver is seeing during the dropout compared to only using past information.
Open 2609.12374v1