Full-Day Tutorial: All You Need to Know about Self-Driving
Thursday, June 4, 9:00 AM | CVPR 2026
Room 301-302, Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO, US
Overview
A full day tutorial covering all aspects of autonomous driving. This tutorial will provide the necessary background for understanding the different tasks and associated challenges, the different sensors and data sources one can use and how to exploit them, as well as how to formulate the relevant algorithmic problems such that efficient learning and inference is possible. We will first introduce the self-driving problem setting and a broad range of existing solutions, both top-down from a high-level perspective, as well as bottom-up from technological and algorithmic points of view. We will then extrapolate from the state of the art and discuss where the challenges and open problems are, and where we need to head towards to provide a scalable, safe and affordable self-driving solution for the future.
Since our previous tutorial back in 2024, countless new and promising avenues of research have started gaining traction, and we have updated our materials accordingly. To name a few examples, this includes topics like world models, object memory, long-tail perception/simulation, and the use of foundation models in tasks such as automatic labeling.
See the tutorial schedule:
Session 1: Introduction to self-driving
Presenter: Andrei Bârsan
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM
In this section we will give a general introduction of self-driving and review the content of this tutorial.
Session 2: Hardware and sensors
Presenter: Andrei Bârsan
9:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Learn about different sensor setups (LiDAR, RADAR, Camera), trade-offs between different kinds of sensors, as well as how to put the sensors together and how to design the associated compute unit.
Session 3: Mapping & Localization
Presenter: Andrei Bârsan
10:00 AM – 10:45 AM
In this session you will learn how and why maps are used in autonomous driving. We cover the different kinds of map representations that are used by tasks like prediction, planning, and simulation and explain their trade-offs. We also cover online mapping together with its benefits and challenges. This session will help you understand how self-driving vehicles robustly establish their precise position within HD maps in order to leverage them for safe and efficient autonomous driving. We will cover the broad range of approaches to localization, covering topics as diverse as place recognition, map matching, point cloud registration, as well as the nascent field of neural SLAM.
Lunch Break
10:45 AM – 11:00 AM
Session 4: Perception
Presenter: Thomas Li
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM
In this session we will discuss how to build a robust 3d perception system by exploiting information from different sources, with different sensor fusion strategies. We will also talk about different output representations that have been used for perception and introduce challenges when we deploy the perception system in the real world, such as unknown object recognition, and take into account the system latency.
Session 5: Motion Forecasting
Presenter: Thomas Gilles
11:45 AM – 12:30 PM
Learn about how and why the future state of the world is forecasted in autonomous driving. We will look into the challenges of this task, different input and output representations, as well as different architectures to tackle this problem.
Lunch Break
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Session 6: Motion planning and control
Presenter: Kelvin Wong
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM
In this session, we will discuss various learnable motion planning pipelines, important aspects of the planning problem, and main approaches to control.
Session 7: Simulation
Presenter: Siva Manivasagam
2:15 PM – 3:00 PM
In this session, we’ll explain the different components required to build a comprehensive simulator for autonomy testing and development. We’ll explain different approaches and recent trends for building virtual worlds, simulating their dynamics, and modelling the vehicle platform interacting within the simulator.
Afternoon Break
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Session 8: Behavior modeling
Presenter: Kelvin Wong
3:30 PM – 4:15 PM
This session covers building realistic and diverse models for simulated traffic participants which react to each other and to the SDV. We will explain different ways to simulate traffic patterns, actor behaviors, and dynamics.
Session 9: World Models
Presenter: Sean Segal
4:15 PM – 5:00 PM
This session explores the promising progress in generative world models (e.g., diffusion models) and discusses both the opportunities and challenges with leveraging them for high fidelity closed loop sensor simulation.
Q & A Panel
5:00PM – 5:15PM
In this section we will give concluding remarks about the tutorial and do a Q&A session covering all the content in the tutorial.