For safe motion planning in real-world, autonomous vehicles require behavior prediction models that are reliable and robust to distribution shifts. The recent studies suggest that the existing learning-based trajectory prediction models do not posses such characteristics and are susceptible to small perturbations that are not present in the training data, largely due to overfitting to spurious correlations while learning. In this paper, we propose a causal disentanglement representation learning approach aiming to separate invariant (causal) and variant (spurious) features for more robust learning. Our method benefits from a novel intervention mechanism in the latent space that estimates potential distribution shifts resulted from spurious correlations using uncertain feature statistics, hence, maintaining the realism of interventions. To facilitate learning, we propose a novel invariance objective based on the variances of the distributions over uncertain statistics to induce the model to focus on invariant representations during training. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale autonomous driving datasets and show that besides achieving state-of-the-art performance, our method can significantly improve prediction robustness to various distribution shifts in driving scenes. We further conduct ablative studies to evaluate the design choices in our proposed framework.

As a safety critical task, autonomous driving requires accurate predictions of road users’ future trajectories for safe motion planning, particularly under challenging conditions. Yet, many recent deep learning methods suffer from a degraded performance on the challenging scenarios, mainly because these scenarios appear less frequently in the training data. To address such a long-tail issue, existing methods force challenging scenarios closer together in the feature space during training to trigger information sharing among them for more robust learning. These methods, however, primarily rely on the motion patterns to characterize scenarios, omitting more informative contextual information, such as interactions and scene layout. We argue that exploiting such information not only improves prediction accuracy but also scene compliance of the generated trajectories. In this paper, we propose to incorporate richer training dynamics information into a prototypical contrastive learning framework. More specifically, we propose a two-stage process. First, we generate rich contextual features using a baseline encoder-decoder framework. These features are split into clusters based on the model’s output errors, using the training dynamics information, and a prototype is computed within each cluster. Second, we retrain the model using the prototypes in a contrastive learning framework. We conduct empirical evaluations of our approach using two large-scale naturalistic datasets and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance by improving accuracy and scene compliance on the long-tail samples. Furthermore, we perform experiments on a subset of the clusters to highlight the additional benefit of our approach in reducing training bias.