Trajectory prediction models in autonomous driving are vulnerable to perturbations from non-causal agents whose actions should not affect the ego-agent's behavior. Such perturbations can lead to incorrect predictions of other agents' trajectories, potentially compromising the safety and efficiency of the ego-vehicle's decision-making process. Motivated by this challenge, we propose Causal tRajecTory predICtion (CRiTIC), a novel model that utilizes a causal discovery network to identify inter-agent causal relations over a window of past time steps. To incorporate discovered causal relationships, we propose a novel Causal Attention Gating mechanism to selectively filter information in the proposed Transformer- based architecture. We conduct extensive experiments on two autonomous driving benchmark datasets to evaluate the robustness of our model against non-causal perturbations and its generalization capacity. Our results indicate that the robustness of predictions can be improved by up to 54% without a significant detriment to prediction accuracy. Lastly, we demonstrate the superior domain generalizability of the proposed model, which achieves up to 29% improvement in cross-domain performance. These results underscore the potential of our model to enhance both robustness and generalization capacity for trajectory prediction in diverse autonomous driving domairis.4

Predicting temporally consistent road users’ trajectories in a multi-agent setting is a challenging task due to the unknown characteristics of agents and their varying intentions. Besides using semantic map information and modeling interactions, it is important to build an effective mechanism capable of reasoning about behaviors at different levels of granularity.To this end, we propose Dynamic goal quErieS with temporal Transductive alIgNmEnt (DESTINE) method. Unlike prior approaches, our approach 1) dynamically predicts agents’ goals irrespective of particular road structures, such as lanes, allowing the method to produce a more accurate estimation of destinations; 2) achieves map-compliant predictions by generating future trajectories in a coarse-to-fine fashion, where the coarser predictions at a lower frame rate serve as intermediate goals; and 3) uses an attention module designed to temporally align predicted trajectories via a masked attention operation.Using the common Argoverse benchmark dataset, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various metrics, and further investigate the contributions of proposed modules via comprehensive ablation studies.

Road user trajectory prediction in dynamic environments is a challenging but crucial task for various applications, such as autonomous driving. One of the main challenges in this domain is the multimodal nature of future trajectories stemming from the unknown yet diverse intentions of the agents. Diffusion models have shown to be very effective in capturing such stochasticity in prediction tasks. However, these models involve many computationally expensive denoising steps and sampling operations that make them a less desirable option for real-time safety-critical applications. To this end, we present a novel framework that leverages diffusion models for predicting future trajectories in a computationally efficient manner. To minimize the computational bottlenecks in iterative sampling, we employ an efficient sampling mechanism that allows us to maximize the number of sampled trajectories for improved accuracy while maintaining inference time in real time. Moreover, we propose a scoring mechanism to select the most plausible trajectories by assigning relative ranks. We show the effectiveness of our approach by conducting empirical evaluations on common pedestrian (UCY/ETH) and autonomous driving (nuScenes) benchmark datasets on which our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several subsets and metrics.

Despite the constant rise in global urban populations and subsequent rise in transportation demand, significant expansion of infrastructure has been hampered by the constraints of space, cost, and environmental concerns. Therefore, optimizing the efficiency of existing infrastructure is becoming increasingly important. Adaptive traffic signal controllers aim to provide demand-responsive strategies to minimize motorists’ delay and achieve higher throughput at signalized intersections. With the advent of new sensory technologies and more intelligent control methods, the contribution of this paper is an adaptive traffic signal controller able to receive un-preprocessed high-dimensional sensory information such as GPS traces from connected vehicles and self-learn to minimize intersection delays. We use deep neural networks to operate directly on detailed sensory inputs and feed them into a reinforcement learning-based optimal control agent. The integration of these two components is known as deep learning. Using deep learning, we achieve two goals: (1) We eliminate the need for handcrafting a feature extraction process such as determining queue lengths, which is challenging and location-specific, and (2) we achieve better performance and faster training times compared to conventional tabular reinforcement learning approaches. We test our proposed controller against a tabular reinforcement learning agent, a reinforcement learning agent with a fully-connected Neural Network as a function approximator, and a state-of-practice, actuated traffic signal controller.