A Fast and Map-Free Model for Trajectory Prediction in Traffics

To handle the two shortcomings of existing methods, (i)nearly all models rely on high-definition (HD) maps, yet the map information is not always available in real traffic scenes and HD map-building is expensive and time-consuming and (ii) existing models usually focus on improving prediction accuracy at the expense of reducing computing efficiency, yet the efficiency is crucial for various real applications, this paper proposes an efficient trajectory prediction model that is not dependent on traffic maps. The core idea of our model is encoding single-agent's spatial-temporal information in the first stage and exploring multi-agents' spatial-temporal interactions in the second stage. By comprehensively utilizing attention mechanism, LSTM, graph convolution network and temporal transformer in the two stages, our model is able to learn rich dynamic and interaction information of all agents. Our model achieves the highest performance when comparing with existing map-free methods and also exceeds most map-based state-of-the-art methods on the Argoverse dataset. In addition, our model also exhibits a faster inference speed than the baseline methods.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

STF: Spatial Temporal Fusion for Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction is a challenging task that aims to predict the future trajectory of vehicles or pedestrians over a short time horizon based on their historical positions. The main reason is that the trajectory is a kind of complex data, including spatial and temporal information, which is crucial for accurate prediction. Intuitively, the more information the model can capture, the more precise the future trajectory can be predicted. However, previous works based on deep learning methods processed spatial and temporal information separately, leading to inadequate spatial information capture, which means they failed to capture the complete spatial information. Therefore, it is of significance to capture information more fully and effectively on vehicle interactions. In this study, we introduced an integrated 3D graph that incorporates both spatial and temporal edges. Based on this, we proposed the integrated 3D graph, which considers the cross-time interaction information. In specific, we design a Spatial-Temporal Fusion (STF) model including Multi-layer perceptions (MLP) and Graph Attention (GAT) to capture the spatial and temporal information historical trajectories simultaneously on the 3D graph. Our experiment on the ApolloScape Trajectory Datasets shows that the proposed STF outperforms several baseline methods, especially on the long-time-horizon trajectory prediction.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Kinematics-aware Trajectory Generation and Prediction with Latent Stochastic Differential Modeling

Trajectory generation and trajectory prediction are two critical tasks for autonomous vehicles, which generate various trajectories during development and predict the trajectories of surrounding vehicles during operation, respectively. However, despite significant advances in improving their performance, it remains a challenging problem to ensure that the generated/predicted trajectories are realistic, explainable, and physically feasible. Existing model-based methods provide explainable results, but are constrained by predefined model structures, limiting their capabilities to address complex scenarios. Conversely, existing deep learning-based methods have shown great promise in learning various traffic scenarios and improving overall performance, but they often act as opaque black boxes and lack explainability. In this work, we integrate kinematic knowledge with neural stochastic differential equations (SDE) and develop a variational autoencoder based on a novel latent kinematics-aware SDE (LK-SDE) to generate vehicle motions. Our approach combines the advantages of both model-based and deep learning-based techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches in producing realistic, physically-feasible, and precisely-controllable vehicle trajectories, benefiting both generation and prediction tasks.Comment: 7 pages, conference paper in motion generatio

Scaling Planning for Automated Driving using Simplistic Synthetic Data

We challenge the perceived consensus that the application of deep learning to solve the automated driving planning task requires a huge amount of real-world data or a realistic simulator. Using a roundabout scenario, we show that this requirement can be relaxed in favour of targeted, simplistic simulated data. A benefit is that such data can be easily generated for critical scenarios that are typically underrepresented in realistic datasets. By applying vanilla behavioural cloning almost exclusively to lightweight simulated data, we achieve reliable and comfortable real-world driving. Our key insight lies in an incremental development approach that includes regular in-vehicle testing to identify sim-to-real gaps, targeted data augmentation, and training scenario variations. In addition to the methodology, we offer practical guidelines for deploying such a policy within a real-world vehicle, along with insights of the resulting qualitative driving behaviour. This approach serves as a blueprint for many automated driving use cases, providing valuable insights for future research and helping develop efficient and effective solutions

Addressing the Impact of Localized Training Data in Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved notable success in learning from graph-structured data, owing to their ability to capture intricate dependencies and relationships between nodes. They excel in various applications, including semi-supervised node classification, link prediction, and graph generation. However, it is important to acknowledge that the majority of state-of-the-art GNN models are built upon the assumption of an in-distribution setting, which hinders their performance on real-world graphs with dynamic structures. In this article, we aim to assess the impact of training GNNs on localized subsets of the graph. Such restricted training data may lead to a model that performs well in the specific region it was trained on but fails to generalize and make accurate predictions for the entire graph. In the context of graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL), resource constraints often lead to scenarios where the dataset is large, but only a portion of it can be labeled, affecting the model's performance. This limitation affects tasks like anomaly detection or spam detection when labeling processes are biased or influenced by human subjectivity. To tackle the challenges posed by localized training data, we approach the problem as an out-of-distribution (OOD) data issue by by aligning the distributions between the training data, which represents a small portion of labeled data, and the graph inference process that involves making predictions for the entire graph. We propose a regularization method to minimize distributional discrepancies between localized training data and graph inference, improving model performance on OOD data. Extensive tests on popular GNN models show significant performance improvement on three citation GNN benchmark datasets. The regularization approach effectively enhances model adaptation and generalization, overcoming challenges posed by OOD data.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

MEET: Mobility-Enhanced Edge inTelligence for Smart and Green 6G Networks

Edge intelligence is an emerging paradigm for real-time training and inference at the wireless edge, thus enabling mission-critical applications. Accordingly, base stations (BSs) and edge servers (ESs) need to be densely deployed, leading to huge deployment and operation costs, in particular the energy costs. In this article, we propose a new framework called Mobility-Enhanced Edge inTelligence (MEET), which exploits the sensing, communication, computing, and self-powering capabilities of intelligent connected vehicles for the smart and green 6G networks. Specifically, the operators can incorporate infrastructural vehicles as movable BSs or ESs, and schedule them in a more flexible way to align with the communication and computation traffic fluctuations. Meanwhile, the remaining compute resources of opportunistic vehicles are exploited for edge training and inference, where mobility can further enhance edge intelligence by bringing more compute resources, communication opportunities, and diverse data. In this way, the deployment and operation costs are spread over the vastly available vehicles, so that the edge intelligence is realized cost-effectively and sustainably. Furthermore, these vehicles can be either powered by renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions, or charged more flexibly during off-peak hours to cut electricity bills.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE Communications Magazin

Geometric Deep Learning for Autonomous Driving: Unlocking the Power of Graph Neural Networks With CommonRoad-Geometric

Heterogeneous graphs offer powerful data representations for traffic, given their ability to model the complex interaction effects among a varying number of traffic participants and the underlying road infrastructure. With the recent advent of graph neural networks (GNNs) as the accompanying deep learning framework, the graph structure can be efficiently leveraged for various machine learning applications such as trajectory prediction. As a first of its kind, our proposed Python framework offers an easy-to-use and fully customizable data processing pipeline to extract standardized graph datasets from traffic scenarios. Providing a platform for GNN-based autonomous driving research, it improves comparability between approaches and allows researchers to focus on model implementation instead of dataset curation.Comment: Presented at IV 202

RMP: A Random Mask Pretrain Framework for Motion Prediction

As the pretraining technique is growing in popularity, little work has been done on pretrained learning-based motion prediction methods in autonomous driving. In this paper, we propose a framework to formalize the pretraining task for trajectory prediction of traffic participants. Within our framework, inspired by the random masked model in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), objects' positions at random timesteps are masked and then filled in by the learned neural network (NN). By changing the mask profile, our framework can easily switch among a range of motion-related tasks. We show that our proposed pretraining framework is able to deal with noisy inputs and improves the motion prediction accuracy and miss rate, especially for objects occluded over time by evaluating it on Argoverse and NuScenes datasets.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2023