Brian Wang Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of Autopilot Software, delivered a keynote titled “Building Foundational Models for Robotics at Tesla” at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). Tesla FSD camera inputs feed into a large-scale neural network (with expanding parameter counts, soon to scale 10x via new hardware). Future Outlook • Extracts only the essential data needed to train models efficiently. Debugging and Interpretability: • Even though the system is end-to-end, Tesla can still prompt the model to output interpretable data: 3D occupancy, road boundaries, objects, signs, traffic lights, etc. • Natural language querying: ask the model why it made a certain decision. • These auxiliary predictions don’t drive the car but help engineers debug and ensure safety. Tesla’s Advanced Gaussian Splatting (3D Scene Modeling): • Tesla developed a custom, ultra-fast Gaussian splatting system to reconstruct 3D scenes from limited camera views. • Produces crisp, accurate 3D renderings even from few camera angles — far better than standard NeRF/splatting approaches. • Enables rapid visual debugging of the driving environment in 3D. Evaluation & World Models: • Evaluation is the hardest challenge: models may perform well offline but fail in real-world conditions. • Tesla builds balanced, diverse evaluation datasets focusing on edge cases — not just easy highway driving. Introduced a learned world simulator (neural network-generated video engine): • Can simulate 8 Tesla camera feeds simultaneously — fully synthetic. • Used for testing, training, and reinforcement learning. • Allows adversarial event injection (e.g., adding a pedestrian or vehicle cutting in). • Enables replaying past failures to verify new model improvements. • Can run in near real-time, letting testers “drive” inside a simulated world. What’s Next: