AUTOPILOT
Autonomous Understanding Through Open-world Perception and Integrated Language Models for On-road Tasks
In conjunction with The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026
June 3-4, 2026 | Denver, Colorado, USA
About AUTOPILOT
3rd Edition · CVPR 2026 Workshop
AUTOPILOT is a workshop on safety-critical autonomous driving, spotlighting robust perception and trajectory forecasting that support reliable decision-making and motion planning. It emphasizes the practical use of foundation models, vision-language and generative, through efficient distillation for on-vehicle deployment. A core theme is open-world learning, addressing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) and known hazards by detecting, predicting, and mitigating novel objects, agents, and events beyond standard taxonomies. AUTOPILOT features invited talks from leading industry experts, an open challenge, and archival proceedings, bringing academia and practitioners together to develop real-world solutions with explicit attention to societal impact, ethics, and reproducible evaluation.
6
Industry Speakers
2
Kaggle Challenges
Full
Day Workshop
CVPR
Proceedings
Invited Speakers
Leading researchers from industry and academia
Dragomir Anguelov
VP, Head of AI Foundations
Waymo
Manmohan Chandraker
Professor, Department Head
UC San Diego / NEC Labs America
Jose M. Alvarez
Director of Research
NVIDIA
Aniruddha Kembhavi
Director of Science Strategy
Wayve
Bat-El Shlomo
Director of Perception
ZOOX
Nemanja Djuric
Principal Tech Lead Manager
Aurora
Call for Papers
We invite high-quality, original research submissions to the AUTOPILOT workshop at CVPR 2026
Archival Track
CVPR Proceedings
Full papers with novel contributions will be published in the official CVPR 2026 workshop proceedings. We expect high-quality submissions with significant technical contributions, rigorous evaluation, and clear presentation of results, with a strong focus on real-world autonomous driving and open-world deployment using VLLMs models.
Non-Archival Track
Extended Abstracts
Extended abstracts and position papers for work-in-progress or preliminary findings. We also welcome papers rejected from the Archival Track can resubmit and papers related to the workshop that are already published in top peer-reviewed conferences and journals can submit for a poster spot to the Non-Archival Track.
Submission Guidelines
- All papers must be submitted via the CVPR 2026 OpenReview workshop portal.
- Submissions should be in PDF format following the official Author Guidelines.
- Submissions must be original, unpublished work with no concurrent submissions.
- Papers should be anonymized for double-blind review.
- Optional supplementary materials (videos, images, code) are allowed.
- Accepted papers will be presented as oral, spotlight, or poster presentations.
Submission Requirements
All submissions must be sent to the AUTOPILOT workshop chairs. In addition to the paper submission, accepted authors are required to provide:
- A 5-minute short video presentation
- Poster materials
- Presentation slides
Topics of Interest
We invite submissions on a broad range of topics related to foundation models, multimodal perception, reasoning, and decision-making for autonomous systems, including but not limited to:
Foundation Models & Multimodal Reasoning
- •Foundation models for autonomous driving (VLMs, LLMs, generative and agentic models)
- •Vision-language models for perception, reasoning, grounding, and scene understanding
- •Embodied AI and multimodal reasoning for decision-making in autonomous vehicles
Open-World & Robust Autonomy
- •Open-world learning: open-set recognition, open-vocabulary learning, and OOD detection
- •Detection, prediction, and avoidance of out-of-label or novel hazards
- •Domain adaptation, transfer learning, and continual learning for robust autonomy
Prediction, Planning & Interaction
- •Multimodal motion forecasting, trajectory prediction, and behavior modeling
- •Activity recognition, pedestrian intention prediction, and human-agent interaction
- •Planning and decision-making under uncertainty
Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
- •Multimodal sensor fusion (camera, LiDAR, radar, maps, depth) for scene understanding
- •Spatio-temporal representation learning for dynamic environments
Generative Models & Simulation
- •Generative models for simulation, data augmentation, forecasting, and scenario synthesis
- •Synthetic data generation and sim-to-real transfer
Systems, Deployment & Evaluation
- •Resource-efficient training, model compression, and edge deployment
- •Real-time inference and scalable autonomous systems
- •Novel datasets, benchmarks, evaluation protocols, and safety-centric metrics
Workshop Challenges
Join our Kaggle competitions focusing on safety-critical autonomous driving tasks
AUTOPILOT
Visual Question Answering
Advance accident understanding through detailed video-based visual question answering. Analyze vehicle trajectories, hazards, visibility, impact zones, and outcomes.
600+
Video Samples
27
Multi-class Labels
Evaluation Metrics
ACCIDENT
Zero-shot Detection
Benchmark accident understanding in real CCTV footage. Tackle temporal localization, spatial localization, and collision type classification.
2,231
Test Clips
5
Collision Types
Tasks
Zero-shot
Zero-shot Anticipation
Multi-modal accident risk anticipation using RGB frames, driver gaze, and text annotations across diverse road environments.
150
Frames/video
5
Driving Scenarios
Evaluation Metrics
All challenges emphasize perception, reasoning, and robustness in open-world scenarios. Winners will present their system analyses during the CVPR 2026 AUTOPILOT workshop. For a related workshop on out-of-label hazards, see 2COOOL @ ICCV 2025.
Important Dates
Mark your calendar for these key milestones
Archival Track
CVPR Proceedings
Call for Papers Announced
Submission Deadline
11:59PM UTC-0
Notification of Acceptance
Camera-Ready Deadline
Submit Virtual Materials
Non-Archival Track
Extended Abstracts & Position Papers
Call for Papers Announced
Submission Deadline
11:59PM UTC-0
Notification of Acceptance
Submit Virtual Materials
Organizing Committee
Meet the team behind AUTOPILOT 2026
Ali K. AlShami
NEC Labs America
Ryan Rabinowitz
Notre Dame
Maged Shoman
UT-ORII
Jianwu Fang
Xi'an Jiaotong Univ.
Lukáš Picek
INRIA / PiVa AI
Shao-yuan Lo
National Taiwan Univ.
Steve Cruz
Notre Dame
Lei-lei Li
Xi'an Jiaotong Univ.
Nachiket Kamod
BNSF | Tech
Jugal Kalita
UCCS
Terrance E. Boult
UCCS