AIDE: An Automatic Data Engine for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Autonomous vehicle (AV) systems rely on robust perception models as a cornerstone of safety assurance. However, objects encountered on the road exhibit a long-tailed distri-bution, with rare or unseen categories posing challenges to a deployed perception model. This necessitates an expen-sive process of continuously curating and annotating data with significant human effort. We propose to leverage recent advances in vision-language and large language models to design an Automatic Data Engine (AIDE) that automati-cally identifies issues, efficiently curates data, improves the model through auto-labeling, and verifies the model through generation of diverse scenarios. This process operates it-eratively, allowing for continuous self-improvement of the model. We further establish a benchmark for open-world detection on AV datasets to comprehensively evaluate vari-ous learning paradigms, demonstrating our method's supe-rior performance at a reduced cost.