An Exploratory Study of Frequency-Aware Task Weighting for YOLOv8-Based Unified Driving Perception

📅 2026-08-31
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF
📝 Abstract
Unified perception enables autonomous driving systems to perform object detection, drivable-area segmentation, and lane segmentation within a single network, improving efficiency and reducing deployment complexity. Jointly optimizing multiple perception tasks remains challenging because tasks exhibit different convergence rates, loss scales, and optimization stability. Existing task-weighting methods use loss magnitude, learned uncertainty, short-term loss changes, or gradient statistics; here, we explore the frequency structure of a recent loss-history window as a complementary signal. We implement and examine Frequency-aware Task Weighting (FTW), a dynamic task-balancing rule that estimates a loss-trajectory stability proxy from the low-frequency energy ratio of recent loss histories. FTW assigns larger weights to tasks whose mean-centered loss trajectories contain a larger proportion of low-frequency power. We document FTW and two baselines under full-network static training and progressive freezing using a unified YOLOv8-based perception framework with three task-specific heads. Experiments on Mapillary Vistas compare FTW with fixed and uncertainty-based weighting under both configurations. Final holdout metrics are reported for the checkpoint with the lowest per-epoch validation loss in each run. Across six single-run configurations, static FTW has the largest derived overall score and lane mIoU, progressive FTW has the largest detection mAP, and static uncertainty weighting has the largest drivable-area mIoU. Without repeated-seed estimates, single-task baselines, or FTW ablations, these rankings are descriptive. The evidence supports the feasibility of loss-frequency-based weighting in this pipeline, but does not establish improvement over the baselines or generalization beyond the reported runs.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

multi-task optimization
loss frequency
task weighting
YOLOv8
unified perception
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Frequency-aware Task Weighting
loss-frequency-based weighting
dynamic task-balancing
unified perception
YOLOv8
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
Z
Zhiyuan Nie
Data Science, NYU Shanghai
Z
Zixi Zhou
Computer Science, NYU Shanghai
X
Xianbin Gu
Computer Science, NYU Shanghai