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Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#161

Post by babesh »

I think the more interesting question is how much human context is necessary in decreasing accident rates. The signal question and tunnel answer hinted at that. Some context is very local and some context is general at the level of humans.

Examples: human eyes will have trouble adjusting to the sudden darkness of tunnels so some people will tend to brake suddenly; that person looks old and will probably have slower reaction times so watch out for the upcoming sharp turn; that person looks like they are on their phone and may cross the lane suddenly; watch out for this intersection because young humans cross it after school without looking so slow down below the speed limit.

This human understanding doesn’t seem to be directly represented by the system without explicit architecting on their part. A more general intelligence would begin to automatically learn these. A human intelligence would automatically model these or learn from experience or read about it.

As mentioned, the current system has some advantages over humans: more eyes, doesn’t get tired or distracted, faster reaction time. I guess we shall see when these advantages cover up the disadvantages.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#162

Post by Robotbeat »

nelsonfavedra wrote: post #50
Robotbeat wrote: post #17

He made a very good argument for vision-only, but it seems like training actually uses radar data to help calibrate vision measurements, so it seems to me there’s value in making some vehicles still contain radar (say, one out of 10) even if it’s not used for controlling the vehicle directly at drive time. Also, the sensor resolution issue he mentioned could be addressed by using a higher resolution radar sensor. I f…

> but it seems like training actually uses radar data to help calibrate vision They seem to use radar solely to automatically label data for training. In the given example though where according to the vision system smog interrupted the persistence of the label for the leading car, I wonder if the use of radar data to persist the label is strictly necessary. A car disappeared then reappeared in the data, why not just…

I don't think it's silly at all, although there are probably other ways to do it (license plates are a known size, so they could be used for calibration... to some extent). In fact, I think going to a sort of mapping solution where some portion of the Teslas on the road provide mapping data (using just calibrated vision) may be appropriate. If the reason you aren't using maps as an extra layer of capability is just because of the cost of mapping, then using Teslas to provide mapping capability "for free" is a good solution.

The argument may be that humans do fine without mapping, but that's not strictly true. Humans remember and anticipate the road based on past memory. When there's a change in the road due to construction, there's often a sign placed to warn drivers of the change in traffic pattern, showing that humans definitely at least partially rely on "mapping," so it could help even a pure vision system.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#163

Post by nightski »

ma2rten wrote: post #143
nightski wrote: post #9

It's interesting that an academic conference now feels like a marketing op for industrial research labs more than anything. His claims about how accurate their vision system is and how it is exceeding other sensors is not verifiable in any way to the public. Given how well qualified he is I am sure he is not wrong! Andrej is brilliant. But this is an academic conference right? This isn't open science, it's a discussi…

The talk wasn't part of the main conference but it was part of a workshop, which was just one out of tons of workshops. http://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/workshops-schedule

Thanks for pointing this out, the distinction wasn't obvious from the linked video - that makes a lot more sense. I haven't been to CVPR since 2014 so it has been a while.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#164

Post by aimkey »

dogma1138 wrote: post #12
sam_goody wrote: post #2

tldr: Tesla uses vision alone, and has dropped radar and the other sensor. He makes a very decent argument why. (Surprisingly, he basically ignores night driving.)

Ironically this is what Tesla criticized Mobileye for. I still think that this is far the best demonstration of autonomous driving to date https://youtu.be/A1qNdHPyHu4

The 11 minute mark is terrifying:

1) The car fails to accelerate to beat the truck as it merges (the safest option given the scenario, even with the yield sign)

2) The car almost collides with the trailer of the truck and it stops with its nose sticking out into the merge lane

3) The car sits there with its nose in the merge lane as other cars go by

4) When the car finally has an opportunity to merge after having done everything wrong up to this point, it sheepishly merges and takes forever to get up to speed. This is basically the least safe thing it can do when yield-merging into a high speed lane.

LOL. This is the best the autonomous driving world has to offer? 80% of this driving is an immediate failure for a teenage driver taking their road course. I think I can take pretty much any random 2 minute sample from that video and find more than a few inputs/maneuvers that would lead to failure in a driver's license test. Why would ANYONE with a brain put their life into the hands of this system?

OH, and do you want to know a little industry secret about these "unedited" long videos? Yes, the video is uncut. But guess what? They drove that route hundreds of times and only showed the best run. And they got laser-HD maps of the route that they won't have globally. This is what Zoox did for their infamous demo that got them bought out by Amazon. And it's what Tesla did for their "Full Self-Driving" video on YouTube that shows driving ability that their cars cannot match even today. Shhh, you didn't hear it from me.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#165

Post by fpgaminer »

babesh wrote: post #161

I think the more interesting question is how much human context is necessary in decreasing accident rates. The signal question and tunnel answer hinted at that. Some context is very local and some context is general at the level of humans. Examples: human eyes will have trouble adjusting to the sudden darkness of tunnels so some people will tend to brake suddenly; that person looks old and will probably have slower r…

I agree, though I think there's an obvious path towards that higher order understanding of the road that humans have.

Suppose they eventually have this current system dialed in and they get really good, accurate bounding boxes around all interesting objects on the road.

So now, in addition to their 10 second samples of video data they're collecting, they start collecting 10 second samples of scene representations.

These samples of scene representations are time series of how various objects in the scene are moving and behaving over time. Many examples of just what you describe: cars with older drivers having slower reaction times; cars with distracted drivers driving recklessly; etc.

Now you train a model on all that data, asking it to make predictions through time. It's going to quickly pick up on the same or similar cues that humans do. It sees an older person in a car and says that slower, cautious paths through the scene are more likely for that vehicle. They see a large, lifted truck and assume a 90% probability of a "cut off every car possible" path through the scene. Etc.

So I see what Karpathy is building now as a foundation upon which they can build the higher order stuff.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#166

Post by rasz »

aeternum wrote: post #14
nightski wrote: post #9

It's interesting that an academic conference now feels like a marketing op for industrial research labs more than anything. His claims about how accurate their vision system is and how it is exceeding other sensors is not verifiable in any way to the public. Given how well qualified he is I am sure he is not wrong! Andrej is brilliant. But this is an academic conference right? This isn't open science, it's a discussi…

In the talk, he gave clear examples with detailed position + velocity graphs where the vision system detected obstacles sooner and with less jitter than the radar system. Specifically the overpass where radar triggers erroneous braking, and the pulled over truck where radar detects the obstacle significantly slower.

and yet cars with radar based collision avoidance dont end up decapitating people, or plowing into parked cop cars.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#167

Post by sedgjh23 »

aimkey wrote: post #118
cs702 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. By all measures I've seen (including a couple of slides in the OP's video), Tesla's self-driving is far safer than human driving: the number of accidents and deaths per mile driven are something like an order of magnitude lower (i.e., around 10x safer). I mean, the machine never gets distracted, tired, sleepy, emotional, drunk, etc., so it is a LOT LESS likely to crash on boring, monotonous road…

>Tesla's self-driving is far safer than human driving: the number of accidents and deaths per mile driven are something like an order of magnitude lower (i.e., around 10x safer). Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Tesla here, is, again, being funny with the numbers. They LOVE to cite autopilot ON death statistics as being "10x safer than normal driving". What they fail to note is that Autopilot can ONLY be on while dri…

> What they fail to note is that Autopilot can ONLY be on while driving on a limited access highway.

This isn’t true anymore

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#169

Post by dang »

ketamine__ wrote: post #111
dang wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27584719 .

[censored by dang]

I didn't even see this comment before you edited it. Please don't pull tricks like this.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#170

Post by xedeon »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #145
aimkey wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems really what you are saying is not that Tesla are charlatan but the whole industry is. The entire industry has an air of charlatanism. Tesla is the biggest charlatan of the bunch. The LIDAR-using ventures at least have a snowball's chance in hell. Tesla has no chance with vision alone.

I would love to know what your credentials are that you can say this with such certainty

Just the fact that this person created a throwaway account just to thrash talk, speak volumes.
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