Efficient Baselines for Motion Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Motion Prediction (MP) of multiple surroundings agents is a crucial task in arbitrarily complex environments, from simple robots to Autonomous Driving Stacks (ADS). Current techniques tackle this problem using end-to-end pipelines, where the input data is usually a rendered top-view of the physical information and the past trajectories of the most relevant agents; leveraging this information is a must to obtain optimal performance. In that sense, a reliable ADS must produce reasonable predictions on time. However, despite many approaches use simple ConvNets and LSTMs to obtain the social latent features, State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) models might be too complex for real-time applications when using both sources of information (map and past trajectories) as well as little interpretable, specially considering the physical information. Moreover, the performance of such models highly depends on the number of available inputs for each particular traffic scenario, which are expensive to obtain, particularly, annotated High-Definition (HD) maps. In this work, we propose several efficient baselines for the well-known Argoverse 1 Motion Forecasting Benchmark. We aim to develop compact models using SOTA techniques for MP, including attention mechanisms and GNNs. Our lightweight models use standard social information and interpretable map information such as points from the driveable area and plausible centerlines by means of a novel preprocessing step based on kinematic constraints, in opposition to black-box CNN-based or too-complex graphs methods for map encoding, to generate plausible multimodal trajectories achieving up-to-pair accuracy with less operations and parameters than other SOTA methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Cram3r95/mapfe4mp .

Exploring Attention GAN for Vehicle Motion Prediction

The design of a safe and reliable Autonomous Driving stack (ADS) is one of the most challenging tasks of our era. These ADS are expected to be driven in highly dynamic environments with full autonomy, and a reliability greater than human beings. In that sense, to efficiently and safely navigate through arbitrarily complex traffic scenarios, ADS must have the ability to forecast the future trajectories of surrounding actors. Current state-of-the-art models are typically based on Recurrent, Graph and Convolutional networks, achieving noticeable results in the context of vehicle prediction. In this paper we explore the influence of attention in generative models for motion prediction, considering both physical and social context to compute the most plausible trajectories. We first encode the past trajectories using a LSTM network, which serves as input to a Multi-Head Self-Attention module that computes the social context. On the other hand, we formulate a weighted interpolation to calculate the velocity and orientation in the last observation frame in order to calculate acceptable target points, extracted from the driveable of the HDMap information, which represents our physical context. Finally, the input of our generator is a white noise vector sampled from a multivariate normal distribution while the social and physical context are its conditions, in order to predict plausible trajectories. We validate our method using the Argoverse Motion Forecasting Benchmark 1.1, achieving competitive unimodal results.

Exploring Map-based Features for Efficient Attention-based Vehicle Motion Prediction

Motion prediction (MP) of multiple agents is a crucial task in arbitrarily complex environments, from social robots to self-driving cars. Current approaches tackle this problem using end-to-end networks, where the input data is usually a rendered top-view of the scene and the past trajectories of all the agents; leveraging this information is a must to obtain optimal performance. In that sense, a reliable Autonomous Driving (AD) system must produce reasonable predictions on time, however, despite many of these approaches use simple ConvNets and LSTMs, models might not be efficient enough for real-time applications when using both sources of information (map and trajectory history). Moreover, the performance of these models highly depends on the amount of training data, which can be expensive (particularly the annotated HD maps). In this work, we explore how to achieve competitive performance on the Argoverse 1.0 Benchmark using efficient attention-based models, which take as input the past trajectories and map-based features from minimal map information to ensure efficient and reliable MP. These features represent interpretable information as the driveable area and plausible goal points, in opposition to black-box CNN-based methods for map processing.