Events, Highlights, & Gallery
Workshops, challenges, achievements, and moments from the Mi3 Lab
Upcoming Events
Workshop on Vision, Language, and Multimodal Human Instructions for Interactive Intelligent Vehicles
A new workshop exploring how vision-language models and natural language instructions can enable more interactive and human-responsive intelligent vehicles. This workshop also hosts the doScenes Instructed Driving Challenge.
DriveX: Workshop on End-to-End Autonomous Driving
DriveX at IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2026 continues the series at a premier venue for intelligent transportation research. This edition hosts the doScenes Instructed Driving Challenge.
Past Events
DriveX: Workshop on End-to-End Autonomous Driving
DriveX at CVPR 2025 brought together leading researchers on end-to-end autonomous driving, featuring invited talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions on vision-language models for driving.
DriveX: Workshop on End-to-End Autonomous Driving
DriveX at ICCV 2025 featured a panel on Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving with Profs. Jiaqi Ma, Daniel Cremers, Jiachen Li, Ross Greer, and Manmohan Chandraker.
VALOR / DriveX Joint Workshop on End-to-End Autonomous Driving
DriveX at IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2025.
VALOR: Workshop on Vision and Language Oriented Representations for Autonomous Driving
VALOR at IEEE ITSC 2024 explored vision-language representations for autonomous driving, covering open-vocabulary perception, language-conditioned planning, and multimodal scene understanding.
Challenges
doScenes Instructed Driving Challenge
A benchmark for instruction-conditioned trajectory prediction. The doScenes dataset extends nuScenes with human-authored language describing intended maneuvers, enabling models to use driver intent as privileged input. Hosted at the VL-IIV workshop and DriveX workshop at IEEE IV 2026.
Highlights, News, and Press
- CourtWatch #187: The Justice Department Owns a Bar (highlighting recent project fighting fake warrants, in collaboration with UC San Diego)
- What Do Driverless Cars and Building Evacuation Routes Have in Common? A Lab at UC Merced
- UC Merced Project Aimed at Making Autonomous Cars Safer with NVIDIA
- Undergrads Have Big Showing at Renowned Technology Conference
- UC Merced Team Takes First Place at Technology Conference
- Grad Student Earns Top Prize at Technology Conference
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CITRIS WIP Symposium "Most Impactful Contribution" Award
Erika Maquiling, Alton Chao, Edmund Chao, and Roshan Ornelas earned this recognition for their work winning 2nd place in the AVA Instruction Generation Challenge at CVPR 2025. Their work continued into an ICCV 2025 workshop paper. -
Multiple students accepted to CRA UR2PhD program
Erika Maquiling, Giovanni Tapia Lopez, and Guillermo Roque participated in the CRA UR2PhD program, developing their research on GPS-guided autonomous vehicle navigation datasets — resulting in their paper on automated data curation using GPS & NLP.
Gallery
Conferences & Workshops
Mi³ Lab on stage accepting the International Grand Prize at the ESV Safety Technology Design Competition
Mi³ Lab receiving the International Grand Prize at the ESV Safety Technology Design Competition
Mi³ Lab at their booth for the ESV Safety Technology Design Competition
CVPR 2025
Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving Panel at ICCV 2025 — Profs. Jiaqi Ma, Daniel Cremers, Jiachen Li, Ross Greer, and Manmohan Chandraker
CVPR 2025
AVA Workshop at CVPR
Tonko presenting at CVPR
IEEE ITSC 2025
Prof. Greer at IEEE ITSC 2025
Prof. Greer moderating DriveX panel on end-to-end autonomous driving at IEEE ITSC 2025
DriveX Workshop at ICCV
IEEE CASE
Mi³ Presenters at IEEE CASE
BayLearn Symposium
Maitrayee presenting RA-L paper at IEEE CASE
Edmund and Erika at CVPR 2025 poster session
Professor Greer and Representative Jim Costa at Fresno International Transportation Innovations Summit
Lab Life & Team
Mi³ Lab interacting with autonomous vehicles as first responders
Graduates Fall 2025 (plus Cristian)
Mi³ Lab shoutout at Workshop on Autonomous Driving at CVPR 2025
Mi³ Lab at Taylor Swift Bench at CVPR 2025
Successful RoboRacer run
Our backyard. Still deciding where to do your PhD? Prospective students and visiting scholars always welcome.
Visits & Collaborations
Prof. Mohan Trivedi visiting the lab
Prof. Mohan Trivedi visiting the lab
Prof. Mohan Trivedi visiting the lab