REVIEW 2 major objections 2 minor 35 references
A hierarchical centerline representation creates cyclic interaction between detection and topology reasoning to improve lane understanding in driving scenes.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · grok-4.3
2026-07-01 08:55 UTC pith:TTXTPDR7
load-bearing objection TopoHR layers point/instance/semantic queries into a cyclic decoder with explicit P2I links, but the large OpenLane-V2 deltas need controlled re-runs of baselines to be convincing. the 2 major comments →
TopoHR: Hierarchical Centerline Representation for Cyclic Topology Reasoning in Driving Scenes with Point-to-Instance Relations
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
TopoHR establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning by introducing a hierarchical centerline representation of point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations that are fused inside a hierarchical decoder, together with a topology reasoning module that jointly models point-to-instance relations and instance-to-instance connections inside one architecture.
What carries the argument
Hierarchical centerline representation consisting of point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations that are integrated and fused inside a hierarchical decoder, enabling cyclic mutual enhancement with a topology reasoning module that captures both P2I and I2I relations.
Load-bearing premise
That the cyclic interaction produced by fusing point, instance, and semantic queries will generate the claimed performance gains on the chosen OpenLane-V2 subsets without any changes to evaluation protocols.
What would settle it
Running TopoHR on OpenLane-V2 subset A or B and finding no improvement, or smaller gains than +3.8 DET_l and +5.4 TOP_ll on A or +11.0 DET_l and +7.9 TOP_ll on B, over the previous best results.
If this is right
- More accurate centerline detection measured by DET_l on both OpenLane-V2 subsets.
- Stronger topology reasoning measured by TOP_ll on both subsets.
- End-to-end training replaces separate sequential MLP-based topology modules.
- Explicit modeling of point-to-instance relations alongside instance-to-instance connections inside one module.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- The same query hierarchy might be tested on other multi-scale perception tasks such as object detection with part-whole relations.
- Public code release would let others check whether the cyclic mechanism transfers to datasets beyond OpenLane-V2.
- The approach could reduce reliance on post-processing steps that current pipelines use to enforce topology consistency.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The manuscript presents TopoHR, an end-to-end framework for topology reasoning in driving scenes. It proposes a hierarchical centerline representation using point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations integrated in a hierarchical decoder, along with a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures point-to-instance (P2I) and instance-to-instance (I2I) relations. The method establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, it reports state-of-the-art performance with improvements of +3.8 in DET_l and +5.4 in TOP_ll on subset_A, and +11.0 in DET_l and +7.9 in TOP_ll on subset_B compared to previous best results.
Significance. If the performance gains are attributable to the proposed hierarchical cyclic design rather than evaluation differences, this work could advance autonomous driving perception by demonstrating the benefits of multi-level feature integration and iterative enhancement between detection and reasoning tasks. The commitment to public code release is a positive aspect for reproducibility.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract and Experiments] Abstract and Experiments: The central performance claims rely on comparisons to 'previous best results' on OpenLane-V2. However, it is not clear whether the baseline methods were re-evaluated using the same data splits, preprocessing, augmentation, training schedules, and metric implementations as TopoHR. Without such controlled comparisons, the reported deltas cannot be confidently attributed to the hierarchical P2I/I2I modules.
- [Experiments] Experiments section: The manuscript reports benchmark numbers but the provided description lacks explicit ablation tables, error bars, or dataset-split details that would verify the contribution of the cyclic interaction and hierarchical queries to the claimed gains.
minor comments (2)
- [Abstract] The notation for metrics (DET_l, TOP_ll) and subsets (subset_A, subset_B) should be explicitly defined or referenced to the OpenLane-V2 paper for clarity.
- Ensure figure captions and method diagrams clearly distinguish the point-to-instance relations from instance-to-instance connections.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the detailed and constructive feedback. We address the two major comments point-by-point below. Where revisions are warranted we indicate them explicitly and will incorporate the changes in the next version of the manuscript.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [Abstract and Experiments] The central performance claims rely on comparisons to 'previous best results' on OpenLane-V2. However, it is not clear whether the baseline methods were re-evaluated using the same data splits, preprocessing, augmentation, training schedules, and metric implementations as TopoHR. Without such controlled comparisons, the reported deltas cannot be confidently attributed to the hierarchical P2I/I2I modules.
Authors: We followed the official OpenLane-V2 benchmark protocol and reported the numbers exactly as published in the original baseline papers, which remains the prevailing practice for this benchmark. All methods share the same official data splits and metric definitions. To strengthen the manuscript we will add an explicit paragraph in the Experiments section clarifying the evaluation protocol and confirming that no custom preprocessing or metric alterations were introduced for TopoHR. While a full re-implementation of every baseline under identical training schedules would be desirable, the ablation studies already isolate the contribution of the hierarchical P2I/I2I modules under controlled conditions within our own framework. revision: partial
-
Referee: [Experiments] The manuscript reports benchmark numbers but the provided description lacks explicit ablation tables, error bars, or dataset-split details that would verify the contribution of the cyclic interaction and hierarchical queries to the claimed gains.
Authors: Section 4.3 already contains ablation tables that quantify the incremental gains from the point queries, instance queries, semantic representations, and the unified P2I+I2I topology module. We will revise this section to (i) present the ablations in a single consolidated table, (ii) report standard deviations over three independent runs as error bars, and (iii) restate the exact train/val/test splits used for both subsets. These additions will make the contribution of the cyclic interaction and hierarchical design more transparent. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No circularity: empirical architecture paper with independent benchmark evaluation
full rationale
The paper presents an end-to-end neural architecture (hierarchical queries, P2I/I2I modules, cyclic interaction) for centerline detection and topology reasoning. It reports empirical gains on OpenLane-V2 without any first-principles derivation, fitted-parameter predictions, or self-referential equations. No load-bearing self-citations, uniqueness theorems, or ansatzes are invoked in the provided text. The central claims rest on standard benchmark deltas rather than any reduction of outputs to inputs by construction. This is the normal case of a self-contained empirical CV method.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
read the original abstract
Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving. Current methods primarily focus on instance-level learning for centerline detection, followed by a sequential module for topology reasoning that relies on simplified MLP layers. Moreover, they often neglect the importance of \textit{point-to-instance} (P2I) relationships in topology reasoning. To address these limitations, we present TopoHR (Topological Hierarchical Representation), a novel end-to-end framework that establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning, allowing them to iteratively enhance each other. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical centerline representation including point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations. These multi-level features are seamlessly integrated and fused within a hierarchical centerline decoder. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures both fine-grained P2I relationships and global instance-to-instance (I2I) connections within a unified architecture. With these novel components, TopoHR ensures accurate and robust topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, TopoHR refreshes state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Notably, compared with previous best results, TopoHR achieves +3.8 in $\mathrm{DET}_{\text{l}}$, +5.4 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{\text{ll}}$ on $\text{subset_A}$ and +11.0 in $\mathrm{DET}_{\text{l}}$, +7.9 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{\text{ll}}$ on $\text{subset_B}$, validating the effectiveness of the proposed components. The code will be shared publicly at https://github.com/Yifeng-Bai/TopoHR.git.
Figures
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
nuscenes: A multi- modal dataset for autonomous driving
Holger Caesar, Varun Bankiti, Alex H Lang, Sourabh V ora, Venice Erin Liong, Qiang Xu, Anush Krishnan, Yu Pan, Gi- ancarlo Baldan, and Oscar Beijbom. nuscenes: A multi- modal dataset for autonomous driving. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 11621–11631, 2020. 6
2020
-
[2]
Structured bird’s-eye-view traffic scene un- derstanding from onboard images
Yigit Baran Can, Alexander Liniger, Danda Pani Paudel, and Luc Van Gool. Structured bird’s-eye-view traffic scene un- derstanding from onboard images. In2021 IEEE/CVF In- ternational Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages 15641–15650. IEEE Computer Society, 2021. 3
2021
-
[3]
Masked-attention mask transformer for universal image segmentation
Bowen Cheng, Ishan Misra, Alexander G Schwing, Alexan- der Kirillov, and Rohit Girdhar. Masked-attention mask transformer for universal image segmentation. InProceed- ings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 1290–1299, 2022. 5
2022
-
[4]
Mask2map: Vectorized hd map construction using bird’s eye view segmentation masks
Sehwan Choi, Jungho Kim, Hongjae Shin, and Jun Won Choi. Mask2map: Vectorized hd map construction using bird’s eye view segmentation masks. InEuropean Confer- ence on Computer Vision, pages 19–36. Springer, 2024. 2
2024
-
[5]
Piv- otnet: Vectorized pivot learning for end-to-end hd map con- struction
Wenjie Ding, Limeng Qiao, Xi Qiu, and Chi Zhang. Piv- otnet: Vectorized pivot learning for end-to-end hd map con- struction. In2023 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages 3649–3659. IEEE, 2023. 3
2023
-
[6]
Topopoint: Enhance topology rea- soning via endpoint detection in autonomous driving
Yanping Fu, Xinyuan Liu, Tianyu Li, Yike Ma, Yucheng Zhang, and Feng Dai. Topopoint: Enhance topology rea- soning via endpoint detection in autonomous driving. InThe Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Pro- cessing Systems. 7
-
[7]
Topologic: An in- terpretable pipeline for lane topology reasoning on driving scenes.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37:61658–61676, 2024
Yanping Fu, Wenbin Liao, Xinyuan Liu, Hang Xu, Yike Ma, Yucheng Zhang, and Feng Dai. Topologic: An in- terpretable pipeline for lane topology reasoning on driving scenes.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37:61658–61676, 2024. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8
2024
-
[8]
3d-lanenet: End-to-end 3d multiple lane detection
Noa Garnett, Rafi Cohen, Tomer Pe’er, Roee Lahav, and Dan Levi. 3d-lanenet: End-to-end 3d multiple lane detection. In 2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vi- sion (ICCV), pages 2921–2930. IEEE, 2019. 1
2019
-
[9]
Deep residual learning for image recognition
Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. Deep residual learning for image recognition. InProceed- ings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 770–778, 2016. 6
2016
-
[10]
Relation detr: Exploring explicit position relation prior for object detection
Xiuquan Hou, Meiqin Liu, Senlin Zhang, Ping Wei, Badong Chen, and Xuguang Lan. Relation detr: Exploring explicit position relation prior for object detection. InEuropean Con- ference on Computer Vision, pages 89–105. Springer, 2024. 5
2024
-
[11]
M Kalfaoglu, Halil Ibrahim Ozturk, Ozsel Kilinc, and Alptekin Temizel. Topomask: Instance-mask-based formu- lation for the road topology problem via transformer-based architecture.arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05419, 2023. 1, 3
-
[12]
M Kalfaoglu, Halil Ibrahim Ozturk, Ozsel Kilinc, and Alptekin Temizel. Topomaskv2: Enhanced instance-mask- based formulation for the road topology problem.arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.11325, 2024. 1, 2
-
[13]
Topobda: Towards bezier de- formable attention for road topology understanding.Neuro- computing, page 132360, 2025
Muhammet Esat Kalfaoglu, Halil Ibrahim Ozturk, Ozsel Kil- inc, and Alptekin Temizel. Topobda: Towards bezier de- formable attention for road topology understanding.Neuro- computing, page 132360, 2025. 1
2025
-
[14]
Hdmapnet: An online hd map construction and evaluation framework
Qi Li, Yue Wang, Yilun Wang, and Hang Zhao. Hdmapnet: An online hd map construction and evaluation framework. In 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 4628–4634. IEEE, 2022. 2
2022
-
[15]
Graph-based topology reasoning for driv- ing scenes.Transactions on Machine Learning Research
Tianyu Li, Li Chen, Huijie Wang, Yang Li, Jiazhi Yang, Xiangwei Geng, Shengyin Jiang, Yuting Wang, Hang Xu, Chunjing Xu, et al. Graph-based topology reasoning for driv- ing scenes.Transactions on Machine Learning Research. 1, 2, 3, 7
-
[16]
Lanesegnet: Map learning with lane segment perception for autonomous driving
Tianyu Li, Peijin Jia, Bangjun Wang, Li Chen, Kun Jiang, Junchi Yan, and Hongyang Li. Lanesegnet: Map learning with lane segment perception for autonomous driving. In 12th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2024, 2024. 1, 3
2024
-
[17]
Bevformer: learning bird’s-eye-view representation from lidar-camera via spatiotemporal transformers.IEEE Transactions on Pat- tern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2024
Zhiqi Li, Wenhai Wang, Hongyang Li, Enze Xie, Chong- hao Sima, Tong Lu, Qiao Yu, and Jifeng Dai. Bevformer: learning bird’s-eye-view representation from lidar-camera via spatiotemporal transformers.IEEE Transactions on Pat- tern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2024. 6
2024
-
[18]
Maptr: Structured modeling and learning for online vectorized hd map construction
Bencheng Liao, Shaoyu Chen, Xinggang Wang, Tianheng Cheng, Qian Zhang, Wenyu Liu, and Chang Huang. Maptr: Structured modeling and learning for online vectorized hd map construction. InThe Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations. 1, 2
-
[19]
Focal loss for dense object detection.IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 42(2):318–327, 2018
TY Lin, P Goyal, R Girshick, K He, and P Dollar. Focal loss for dense object detection.IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 42(2):318–327, 2018. 6
2018
-
[20]
Feature pyra- mid networks for object detection
Tsung-Yi Lin, Piotr Doll ´ar, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He, Bharath Hariharan, and Serge Belongie. Feature pyra- mid networks for object detection. InProceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recogni- tion, pages 2117–2125, 2017. 6
2017
-
[21]
Mgmap: Mask-guided learn- ing for online vectorized hd map construction
Xiaolu Liu, Song Wang, Wentong Li, Ruizi Yang, Junbo Chen, and Jianke Zhu. Mgmap: Mask-guided learn- ing for online vectorized hd map construction. In2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 14812–14821. IEEE Computer Society, 2024. 2
2024
-
[22]
Vectormapnet: End-to-end vectorized hd map learning
Yicheng Liu, Tianyuan Yuan, Yue Wang, Yilun Wang, and Hang Zhao. Vectormapnet: End-to-end vectorized hd map learning. InInternational Conference on Machine Learning, pages 22352–22369. PMLR, 2023. 2
2023
-
[23]
Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization
Ilya Loshchilov and Frank Hutter. Decoupled weight decay regularization.arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.05101, 2017. 7
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2017
-
[24]
Aug- menting lane perception and topology understanding with standard definition navigation maps
Katie Z Luo, Xinshuo Weng, Yan Wang, Shuang Wu, Jie Li, Kilian Q Weinberger, Yue Wang, and Marco Pavone. Aug- menting lane perception and topology understanding with standard definition navigation maps. In2024 IEEE Inter- national Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 4029–4035. IEEE, 2024. 3, 7
2024
-
[25]
Yueru Luo, Changqing Zhou, Yiming Yang, Erlong Li, Chao Zheng, Shuqi Mei, Shuguang Cui, and Zhen Li. Reltopo: En- hancing relational modeling for driving scene topology rea- soning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.13553, 2025. 3, 7
-
[26]
T2sg: Traffic topology scene graph for topology reasoning in autonomous driving
Changsheng Lv, Mengshi Qi, Liang Liu, and Huadong Ma. T2sg: Traffic topology scene graph for topology reasoning in autonomous driving. In2025 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 17197–17206. IEEE Computer Society, 2025. 1, 2, 3, 7
2025
-
[27]
Sept: Standard-definition map enhanced scene perception and topology reasoning for au- tonomous driving.IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,
Muleilan Pei, Jiayao Shan, Peiliang Li, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao, and Shaojie Shen. Sept: Standard-definition map enhanced scene perception and topology reasoning for au- tonomous driving.IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,
-
[28]
Openlane-v2: A topology reasoning benchmark for unified 3d hd mapping.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36, 2024
Huijie Wang, Tianyu Li, Yang Li, Li Chen, Chonghao Sima, Zhenbo Liu, Bangjun Wang, Peijin Jia, Yuting Wang, Shengyin Jiang, et al. Openlane-v2: A topology reasoning benchmark for unified 3d hd mapping.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36, 2024. 2, 6
2024
-
[29]
Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting
Benjamin Wilson, William Qi, Tanmay Agarwal, John Lambert, Jagjeet Singh, Siddhesh Khandelwal, Bowen Pan, Ratnesh Kumar, Andrew Hartnett, Jhony Kaesemodel Pontes, et al. Argoverse 2: Next generation datasets for self-driving perception and forecasting.arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.00493, 2023. 6
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2023
-
[30]
Dongming Wu, Jiahao Chang, Fan Jia, Yingfei Liu, Tiancai Wang, and Jianbing Shen. Topomlp: An simple yet strong pipeline for driving topology reasoning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.06753, 2023. 1, 2, 3
-
[31]
Centerlinedet: Centerline graph detection for road lanes with vehicle-mounted sensors by transformer for hd map generation
Zhenhua Xu, Yuxuan Liu, Yuxiang Sun, Ming Liu, and Lu- jia Wang. Centerlinedet: Centerline graph detection for road lanes with vehicle-mounted sensors by transformer for hd map generation. In2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 3553–3559. IEEE,
-
[32]
Sen Yang, Minyue Jiang, Ziwei Fan, Xiaolu Xie, Xiao Tan, Yingying Li, Errui Ding, Liang Wang, and Jingdong Wang. Toposd: Topology-enhanced lane segment perception with sdmap prior.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.14751, 2024. 3
-
[33]
Topo2seq: En- hanced topology reasoning via topology sequence learning
Yiming Yang, Yueru Luo, Bingkun He, Erlong Li, Zhipeng Cao, Chao Zheng, Shuqi Mei, and Zhen Li. Topo2seq: En- hanced topology reasoning via topology sequence learning. InProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelli- gence, pages 9318–9326, 2025. 3
2025
-
[34]
Online map vec- torization for autonomous driving: A rasterization perspec- tive.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36:31865–31877, 2023
Gongjie Zhang, Jiahao Lin, Shuang Wu, Zhipeng Luo, Yang Xue, Shijian Lu, Zuoguan Wang, et al. Online map vec- torization for autonomous driving: A rasterization perspec- tive.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36:31865–31877, 2023. 2
2023
-
[35]
TopoHR, Ins
Yi Zhou, Hui Zhang, Jiaqian Yu, Yifan Yang, Sangil Jung, Seung-In Park, and ByungIn Yoo. Himap: Hybrid repre- sentation learning for end-to-end vectorized hd map con- struction. In2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vi- sion and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 15396–15406. IEEE, 2024. 3 TopoHR: Hierarchical Centerline Representation for Cyclic Topology...
2024
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.