DynamicCity: Large-Scale 4D Occupancy Generation from Dynamic Scenes

Authors: Hengwei Bian, Lingdong Kong, Haozhe Xie, Liang Pan, Yu Qiao, Ziwei Liu
Primary area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
Keywords: LiDAR Generation, Dynamic Scenes, 4D Generation

Abstract:
Urban scene generation has been developing rapidly recently. However, existing methods primarily focus on generating static and single-frame scenes, overlooking the inherently dynamic nature of real-world driving environments. In this work, we introduce DynamicCity, a novel 4D occupancy generation framework capable of generating large-scale, high-quality dynamic 4D scenes with semantics. DynamicCity mainly consists of two key models. **1)** A VAE model for learning HexPlane as the compact 4D representation. Instead of using naive averaging operations, DynamicCity employs a novel **Projection Module** to effectively compress 4D features into six 2D feature maps for HexPlane construction, which significantly enhances HexPlane fitting quality (up to **12.56** mIoU gain). Furthermore, we utilize an **Expansion & Squeeze Strategy** to reconstruct 3D feature volumes in parallel, which improves both network training efficiency and reconstruction accuracy than naively querying each 3D point (up to **7.05** mIoU gain, **2.06x** training speedup, and **70.84\%** memory reduction). **2)** A DiT-based diffusion model for HexPlane generation. To make HexPlane feasible for DiT generation, a **Padded Rollout Operation** is proposed to reorganize all six feature planes of the HexPlane as a squared 2D feature map. In particular, various conditions could be introduced in the diffusion or sampling process, supporting **versatile 4D generation applications**, such as trajectory- and command-driven generation, inpainting, and layout-conditioned generation. Extensive experiments on the CarlaSC and Waymo datasets demonstrate that DynamicCity significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art 4D occupancy generation methods across multiple metrics. The code and models have been released to facilitate future research.

Decision: accept (spotlight)
Reviewer scores: 8, 8, 8, 6

Reviews and discussion:
<thread>
creation date:
1730083528905

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_urnx

<content>
summary:
This paper proposes DynamicCity for large-scale driving environments for 4D generation. The paper proposes a Projection Module to efficiently 4D features into six 2D feature maps and an Expansion & Squeeze Strategy to reconstruct 3D feature volumes in parallel. A Padded Rollout Operation is also proposed to reorganize all six feature planes of the HexPlane as a squared 2D feature map.

strengths:
1. The writing is easy to follow.

2. The ablation is comprehensive and validates the efficiency of Padded Rollout, Projection Module, and ESS in Table 3 and Table 5.

3. The results are good compared to the baseline method over different datasets.

4. The trajectory-guided generation, dynamic scene inpainting, and layout-conditioned generation show various downstream applications.

weaknesses:
1. The Dynamic Object Inpainting Results seem to make the ground have holes(Figure 1). Could you please explain this phenomenon and discuss any potential limitations or artifacts of this inpainting approach?

2. The results seem to reflect semantic occupancy, with training data voxelized into occupancy format using LiDAR point clouds. Could you clarify why "LiDAR generation" is used in the title, abstract, and introduction? It would be helpful to explain the distinction between "LiDAR generation" and "semantic occupancy generation" as used throughout the paper, as well as the relationship between LiDAR data and the voxelized occupancy representation. This clarification would help ensure that the terminology accurately represents the method and results.

3. It’s recommended to add a comparison of model size across different methods, as the proposed approach appears to require substantial training resources.

4. While a training time comparison is provided in the ablation study, it’s still suggested to include a comparison of training time and GPU requirements specifically against the baseline method, like Occ-sora. These comparisons could help readers better understand how much computational power the proposed method needs compared to other established methods.

questions:
Same as Weakness.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730598284485

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_a6q2

<content>
summary:
This paper presents DynamicCity, a novel 4D scene generation method for driving environments. DynamicCity utilizes a VAE model to compress 4D scenes into a HexPlane, integrating strategies such as a Projection Module and an Expansion & Squeeze Strategy to enhance performance and efficiency. A DiT-based diffusion model is then employed for generating the HexPlane. The method supports various 4D scene generation applications, including trajectory, command, and layout conditions. Basically this is a strong submission with impressive results, while I have several further concerns.

strengths:
1. The paper is well-structured and easy to follow.
2. The generated results are impressive, with an accompanying demonstration video that effectively showcases the method’s capabilities.
3. The proposed method has a clear motivation and presents a well-reasoned pipeline.

weaknesses:
1. I’m a little confused by the title and the task definition. While the authors state that the proposed method is designed for “LiDAR” generation, the results seem more akin to “occupancy” generation. These concepts are distinct, despite both representing the scene’s geometry. For true LiDAR generation [1][2], the outputs should be LiDAR point clouds that reflect the sampling properties of LiDAR sensors (e.g., ray drop, ray-based sampling, etc).
2. The authors note that the method can support long sequential modeling of up to 128 frames, but the factors limiting sequence length (e.g., GPU memory) are not discussed. Additionally, the inference running time is not mentioned.
3. Can the proposed method support outpainting similar to SemCity? While inpainting results are shown to demonstrate the spatial significance of the HexPlane, outpainting results could further demonstrate the method’s ability to expand scenes. Furthermore, the inpainting examples in the paper are confined to small regions.
4. Regarding the experimental results, I suggest to provide quantitative comparison with SemCity in static scenes. The caption of Table 2 points out the authors compare the method with SemCIty, but I do not see results in the table.

[1] Ran, Haoxi, Vitor Guizilini, and Yue Wang. "Towards Realistic Scene Generation with LiDAR Diffusion Models." *Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition*. 2024.

[2] Zyrianov, Vlas, et al. "LidarDM: Generative LiDAR Simulation in a Generated World." *arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.02903* (2024).

questions:
Please refer to the Weaknesses.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730778076080

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_nfdl

<content>
summary:
The paper proposes a diffusion-based 4D LiDAR scene generation method. This task
is sometimes referred to as "LiDAR world modeling". The approach performs
diffusion in a HexPlane latent space, and the diffusion can be conditioned on
past data in order to perform autoregressive synthesis, or on semantics in order
to perform layout-guided generation. This makes the approach amenable to
closed-loop simulation.

The encoding stage follows a VAE framework, leveraging a LiDAR backbone followed
by a novel projection module which produces spatio-temporal HexPlanes as the
output.

The decoding stage starts with HexPlanes, decodes them into spatio-temporal
feature volumes, and then finally into 4D semantic occupancy. The tokenization
and diffusion-based generative modeling is performed in this HexPlane latent
space.

At generation time, the diffusion transformer (DiT) component generates new
scenes by performing diffusion in the HexPlane space, optionally conditioning
the generation on a semantic map, or on past generation results to achieve
autoregressive synthesis. These samples then get decoded into 4D semantic
occupancy using the method described above.

The authors compare the approach to OccSora, another recent 4D generative
modeling technique, and show improved results on synthetic (CARLA-based) and
real (Waymo- and nuScenes-based) datasets.

strengths:
- [S0] Flexible modeling approach which seems to scale well to large scenes while
  still allowing a wide range of rich conditioning methods.
- [S1] The proposed approach outperforms OccSora, a very modern competitor, in a
  wide range of metrics, including FID, precision, and recall.
- [S2] Some interesting implementation tricks could potentially be applied to
  other related tasks. For example, diffusion runs on a 2D setting with a clever
  tiling of the six HexPlanes into a single plane (Fig 4 - the "Padded Rollout").
- [S3] Overall, the paper is very well-written and provides thorough experiments,
  architectural details, and discussions. The appendix is likewise
  well-structured and I found it very easy to navigate.

weaknesses:
- [W0] The pretrained networks used to calculate IS, FID, and KID should be
  motivated more thoroughly, especially in the 2D case.
  - For example, it is not clear why it is meaningful to use a CNN presumably
    trained on ImageNet or COCO to reason about samples consisting of semantic
    color maps. Unless this 2D CNN is trained to process semantic color maps as
    inputs, passing semantic color maps to such a CNN would produce OOD feature
    maps.
- [W1] One conceptual limitation is the fact that the method does not explicitly
  model uncertainty when forecasting a future scene conditioned on the present.
  Is this something that can be modeled by sampling multiple futures from the
  latent space?
- [W2] The core applications of 4D world modeling are tasks like simulation and
  motion forecasting. Presenting some results in this area could strengthen the
  paper. For example, this could include demonstrating that the world model
  performs well on a motion forecasting benchmark, or that it can be used to
  supplement training data for an end-to-end autonomous driving model.
- [W3] No source code seems to be promised.
- [W4] In the current stage, the approach is LiDAR-only. This is a minor
  limitation, though, and I am primarily mentioning it for completeness.
- Minor suggestions:
  - L245: "first generate" -> "first generates"
  - L866: Missing parentheses around the PyTorch citation.

questions:
- [Q0] How do you calculate metrics like FID in 2D? What specific features do
  you use for the computation? BEV? What is the network used in these metrics
  originally trained on? I could not find this info in the references provided
  at the end of Section 5.1. If the pre-trained InceptionV3 and VGG-16 networks
  from A.2. are pre-trained on natural images, are they a good fit for comparing
  (what I assume to be) BEV semantic images?
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730907587223

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_d4sh

<content>
summary:
This paper proposes DynamicCity, a novel 4D LiDAR scene generation framework that supports large-scale dynamic reconstruction and generation. It introduces HexPlane as the compact 4D representation with effective decomposition to enhance the reconstruction quality. In order to improve the query efficiency, the authors further employ an expansion & squeeze strategy (ESS) to decode features in parallel. During the generation stage, this paper proposes a padded rollout operation to reorganize the six feature planes into a square feature map for better spatial and temporal awareness. Based on the VAE and DiT pipeline, DynamicCity achieves leading performance on both 4D reconstruction and generation, which also enables long sequential modeling and diverse conditional generation.

strengths:
- Compared to existing methods that lack the ability of long-term dynamic generation, this paper utilizes Hexplane as the compact 4D representation and reorganizes into one feature map to achieve efficient reconstruction and generation. 

- The decoding manner in parallel proposed in Expansion & Squeeze Strategy (ESS) alleviates the problem of dense queries and further improves the generation efficiency.

- Based on the VAE and DiT pipeline, the authors introduce diverse conditions for generation (e.g., command, trajectory and layout), demonstrating the potential of the model and its broad applications.

- The overall paper is easy to follow with excellent illustration and clear statements of contributions, making it very comfortable to read.

weaknesses:
- Despite the compact HexPlane and parallel decoder, the dense feature volume and projection module of autoencoder are still very heavy, which limits its efficiency and scalability. 

- The sample of the dataset is quite limited, which may lead to overfitting and memorization of the data by the generation model. This paper also lacks clarification of the division of training and test sets, as well as experiments and comparative results for their generalization ability and generative diversity. 

- Although the authors provide diverse control conditions for generation, there is a lack of some more simple and practical conditions such as images, text or single-frame point clouds that are easily accessible.

questions:
According to the weaknesses above, there are some concerns to be addressed:

1. It's noted that there are some recent works like XCube using advanced 3D sparse structure to improve the efficiency. Thus, it needs more explanation and comparison for the 3D backbone.  

2. Does the model have the generalization ability and generative diversity? Overfitting to a few samples may reduce its significance. It would be better to provide more (conditional) generation results on the test set and multiple sampling results.

3. It would be much more beneficial to incorporate more practical conditions such as images, text or single-frame point clouds, which is also helpful for the assessment of generalization ability.

4. Given that the title is LARGE-SCALE LIDAR GENERATION, it may be plausible to include the generation or simulation of LiDAR point clouds (beyond occupancy) in the application. Or to avoid ambiguity.

5. How to better demonstrate temporal consistency compared to baselines, which is difficult to reflect in current metrics?
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1732349860044

thread_type:
official_comment

<thread_object>
creator: authors

<content>
title:
General Response

comment:
We sincerely thank our reviewers for their time and effort in providing thorough and constructive feedback on our paper. 

---

We are encouraged to see that our reviewers recognize this work as a novel and high-quality framework for 4D occupancy generation:

- Reviewers `D4sh`, `nfdL`, `a6Q2`, and `URnX` think our paper is *"well-written, easy to follow, and effectively structured"*. 
- Reviewers `D4sh`, `nfdL`, and `a6Q2` think our pipeline is *"novel"* and *"introduces effective techniques such as Padded Rollout and ESS"*. 
- Reviewers `D4sh`, `nfdL`, and `URnX` think our method *"achieves strong performance, outperforming baselines like OccSora in multiple metrics"*.
- Reviewers `D4sh`, `a6Q2`, and `URnX` think our work *"demonstrates broad applicability, supporting diverse conditional generation tasks"*.

---

We highlight our contributions as follows: 

- **DynamicCity** encodes 4D Occupancy as HexPlanes using a novel VAE that incorporates **Projection Modules** and an **Expansion & Squeeze Strategy (ESS)**. Additionally, we propose a **Padded Rollout Operation** on the fitted HexPlanes, enabling the modeling of spatial and temporal relationships during the diffusion process. Finally, we showcase a variety of **applications** to demonstrate the potential of our models.

---

As suggested by the reviewers, we revised our manuscript and website as follows:

***Additional Results:***
- Updated the 2D generation evaluation results in Table 2 and included an example of the 2D semantic map in Appendix Section A.2, as suggested by Reviewer `nfdL`.
- Added occupancy forecasting result, as suggested by Reviewer `nfdL` in Appendix Section B.2.
- Added user study results, including the evaluation of temporal consistency, in the Appendix Section B.3 as suggested by Reviewer `D4sh`.
- Added a comparison of model speed, memory consumption, and size with OccSora in the Appendix Section B.4, as suggested by Reviewers `a6Q2` and `URnX`.
- Included a comparison with SemCity in the Appendix Section B.5, as suggested by Reviewer `a6Q2`.
- Added outpainting results in Appendix Section C.7 as suggested by Reviewer `a6Q2`.
- Added single-frame occupancy conditional generation results in Appendix Section C.8 as suggested by Reviewer `D4sh`.

***Other Modifications:***
- Changed the "LiDAR" in our title to "Occupancy" and added additional explanations to avoid ambiguity, as suggested by Reviewers `D4sh`, `a6Q2`, and `URnX`.
- Fixed typos and formatting errors, as suggested by Reviewer `nfdL`.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>


Metareview:
metareview:
The paper introduces DynamicCity, a novel framework for 4D LiDAR scene generation. The proposed method is enabled by careful integration of a set of features: (i) HexPlane representation, (ii) Expansion & Squeeze Strategy (a parallel decoding mechanism that addresses dense queries, enhancing query efficiency and scalability), (iii) Padded Rollout Operation, and (iv) Diffusion-based Generation. While the reviewers initially have some concerns about efficiency, generalization, and metrics, the authors carefully addressed most of them during the rebuttal discussion phase. The paper, at the end, received unanimous positive reviews. The ACs agreed with the reviewers that the execution of the paper is extraordinary and the proposed method is very effective in addressing 4D scene generation. It is exciting to see that the introduced method supports diverse conditional generation methods and can model sequences up to 128 frames. It is a clear accept.