PeraCom undergraduates triumph against Graduate Students and Research Scientists from World’s Top Universities and Research Institutes on Autonomous Driving

We are delighted to share that a student team from the Department of Computer Engineering has won the Best Perception Paper Award at the AAAI-2025 Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving (ML4AD) Workshop (ML4AD) Workshop, held on March 4th in Philadelphia, USA.

This award is especially noteworthy because the winning paper was a Final-Year Undergraduate Project, carried out over just a few months at #PeraCom by Sathira Silva and Savindu Wannigama (E/17 batch). The project was supervised by Gihan Jayatilaka (E/14 batch, now a PhD student at University of Maryland), Prof. Roshan G. Ragel, and involved collaboration with Dr. Muhammad Haris Khan of MBZUAI, UAE.

This was the ONLY undergraduate-led paper at the workshop—and it went up against long-term research by PhD students and research scientists from some of the most elite institutions in the field. That includes:

• Toyota Research Institute + UIUC
• Carnegie Mellon University’s Auton Lab
• University of Virginia’s Cavalier Autonomous Racing team – who just won the Indy Autonomous Challenge 2024 with a jaw-dropping 296 km/h top speed.

The ML4AD Workshop, hosted for the first time at AAAI after eight consecutive years at NeurIPS, is one of the most competitive spaces in AI for self-driving vehicles. Winning here means standing out among world-class researchers in both academia and industry.

The award-winning paper, “A Spatiotemporal Approach to Tri-Perspective Representation for 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction,” introduces a novel architecture—S2TPVFormer—that integrates temporal information into the Tri-Perspective View (TPVFormer) framework. This improves the predictive accuracy of 3D semantic occupancy, a crucial component in real-time autonomous driving perception.

The award carries $2,500 in prize money and opportunities for future industry engagement.

Here’s what Gihan, who presented the work and accepted the award in person, had to say: “The chief organizer made a LinkedIn post about our work. Before announcing the award, he spent time walking the audience through its technical strengths and even areas for improvement. It was clear they had carefully studied our paper before deciding.”

This isn’t just a best paper win—it’s a signal that even a short-term, undergraduate project from our students can compete with and outperform long-standing research efforts from some of the most recognized names in the field.

Achievements of this caliber reflect not only the exceptional potential and dedication of our students but also highlight the quality of mentorship, resources, and opportunities provided by the Department of Computer Engineering.

For those interested in this pioneering work, you can access the project page and the paper through the following links: Visit the Project Page. Read the Award-Winning Paper.

Congratulations again to our talented student researchers and their dedicated supervisors at #PeraCom on this outstanding accomplishment!