SafeCast: Risk-Responsive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Vehicles

Accurate motion forecasting is essential for the safety and reliability of autonomous driving (AD) systems. While existing methods have made significant progress, they often overlook explicit safety constraints and struggle to capture the complex interactions among traffic agents, environmental factors, and motion dynamics. To address these challenges, we present SafeCast, a risk-responsive motion forecasting model that integrates safety-aware decision-making with uncertainty-aware adaptability. SafeCast is the first to incorporate the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) framework into motion forecasting, encoding interpretable safety rules--such as safe distances and collision avoidance--based on traffic norms and physical principles. To further enhance robustness, we introduce the Graph Uncertainty Feature (GUF), a graph-based module that injects learnable noise into Graph Attention Networks, capturing real-world uncertainties and enhancing generalization across diverse scenarios. We evaluate SafeCast on four real-world benchmark datasets--Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM), Highway Drone (HighD), ApolloScape, and the Macao Connected Autonomous Driving (MoCAD)--covering highway, urban, and mixed-autonomy traffic environments. Our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy while maintaining a lightweight architecture and low inference latency, underscoring its potential for real-time deployment in safety-critical AD systems.

CoT-Drive: Efficient Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving with LLMs and Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Accurate motion forecasting is crucial for safe autonomous driving (AD). This study proposes CoT-Drive, a novel approach that enhances motion forecasting by leveraging large language models (LLMs) and a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting method. We introduce a teacher-student knowledge distillation strategy to effectively transfer LLMs' advanced scene understanding capabilities to lightweight language models (LMs), ensuring that CoT-Drive operates in real-time on edge devices while maintaining comprehensive scene understanding and generalization capabilities. By leveraging CoT prompting techniques for LLMs without additional training, CoT-Drive generates semantic annotations that significantly improve the understanding of complex traffic environments, thereby boosting the accuracy and robustness of predictions. Additionally, we present two new scene description datasets, Highway-Text and Urban-Text, designed for fine-tuning lightweight LMs to generate context-specific semantic annotations. Comprehensive evaluations of five real-world datasets demonstrate that CoT-Drive outperforms existing models, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency in handling complex traffic scenarios. Overall, this study is the first to consider the practical application of LLMs in this field. It pioneers the training and use of a lightweight LLM surrogate for motion forecasting, setting a new benchmark and showcasing the potential of integrating LLMs into AD systems.

Minds on the Move: Decoding Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving with Cognitive Insights

In mixed autonomous driving environments, accurately predicting the future trajectories of surrounding vehicles is crucial for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In driving scenarios, a vehicle's trajectory is determined by the decision-making process of human drivers. However, existing models primarily focus on the inherent statistical patterns in the data, often neglecting the critical aspect of understanding the decision-making processes of human drivers. This oversight results in models that fail to capture the true intentions of human drivers, leading to suboptimal performance in long-term trajectory prediction. To address this limitation, we introduce a Cognitive-Informed Transformer (CITF) that incorporates a cognitive concept, Perceived Safety, to interpret drivers' decision-making mechanisms. Perceived Safety encapsulates the varying risk tolerances across drivers with different driving behaviors. Specifically, we develop a Perceived Safety-aware Module that includes a Quantitative Safety Assessment for measuring the subject risk levels within scenarios, and Driver Behavior Profiling for characterizing driver behaviors. Furthermore, we present a novel module, Leanformer, designed to capture social interactions among vehicles. CITF demonstrates significant performance improvements on three well-established datasets. In terms of long-term prediction, it surpasses existing benchmarks by 12.0% on the NGSIM, 28.2% on the HighD, and 20.8% on the MoCAD dataset. Additionally, its robustness in scenarios with limited or missing data is evident, surpassing most state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, and paving the way for real-world applications.

DEMO: A Dynamics-Enhanced Learning Model for Multi-Horizon Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on accurate trajectory prediction of surrounding vehicles to ensure the safety of both passengers and other road users. Trajectory prediction spans both short-term and long-term horizons, each requiring distinct considerations: short-term predictions rely on accurately capturing the vehicle's dynamics, while long-term predictions rely on accurately modeling the interaction patterns within the environment. However current approaches, either physics-based or learning-based models, always ignore these distinct considerations, making them struggle to find the optimal prediction for both short-term and long-term horizon. In this paper, we introduce the Dynamics-Enhanced Learning MOdel (DEMO), a novel approach that combines a physics-based Vehicle Dynamics Model with advanced deep learning algorithms. DEMO employs a two-stage architecture, featuring a Dynamics Learning Stage and an Interaction Learning Stage, where the former stage focuses on capturing vehicle motion dynamics and the latter focuses on modeling interaction. By capitalizing on the respective strengths of both methods, DEMO facilitates multi-horizon predictions for future trajectories. Experimental results on the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM), Macau Connected Autonomous Driving (MoCAD), Highway Drone (HighD), and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that DEMO outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines in both short-term and long-term prediction horizons.

NEST: A Neuromodulated Small-world Hypergraph Trajectory Prediction Model for Autonomous Driving

Accurate trajectory prediction is essential for the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving. Traditional models often struggle with real-time processing, capturing non-linearity and uncertainty in traffic environments, efficiency in dense traffic, and modeling temporal dynamics of interactions. We introduce NEST (Neuromodulated Small-world Hypergraph Trajectory Prediction), a novel framework that integrates Small-world Networks and hypergraphs for superior interaction modeling and prediction accuracy. This integration enables the capture of both local and extended vehicle interactions, while the Neuromodulator component adapts dynamically to changing traffic conditions. We validate the NEST model on several real-world datasets, including nuScenes, MoCAD, and HighD. The results consistently demonstrate that NEST outperforms existing methods in various traffic scenarios, showcasing its exceptional generalization capability, efficiency, and temporal foresight. Our comprehensive evaluation illustrates that NEST significantly improves the reliability and operational efficiency of autonomous driving systems, making it a robust solution for trajectory prediction in complex traffic environments.

Real-time Accident Anticipation for Autonomous Driving Through Monocular Depth-Enhanced 3D Modeling

The primary goal of traffic accident anticipation is to foresee potential accidents in real time using dashcam videos, a task that is pivotal for enhancing the safety and reliability of autonomous driving technologies. In this study, we introduce an innovative framework, AccNet, which significantly advances the prediction capabilities beyond the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) 2D-based methods by incorporating monocular depth cues for sophisticated 3D scene modeling. Addressing the prevalent challenge of skewed data distribution in traffic accident datasets, we propose the Binary Adaptive Loss for Early Anticipation (BA-LEA). This novel loss function, together with a multi-task learning strategy, shifts the focus of the predictive model towards the critical moments preceding an accident. {We rigorously evaluate the performance of our framework on three benchmark datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D), and DADA-2000 Dataset--demonstrating its superior predictive accuracy through key metrics such as Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA).

When, Where, and What? A Novel Benchmark for Accident Anticipation and Localization with Large Language Models

As autonomous driving systems increasingly become part of daily transportation, the ability to accurately anticipate and mitigate potential traffic accidents is paramount. Traditional accident anticipation models primarily utilizing dashcam videos are adept at predicting when an accident may occur but fall short in localizing the incident and identifying involved entities. Addressing this gap, this study introduces a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance predictive capabilities across multiple dimensions--what, when, and where accidents might occur. We develop an innovative chain-based attention mechanism that dynamically adjusts to prioritize high-risk elements within complex driving scenes. This mechanism is complemented by a three-stage model that processes outputs from smaller models into detailed multimodal inputs for LLMs, thus enabling a more nuanced understanding of traffic dynamics. Empirical validation on the DAD, CCD, and A3D datasets demonstrates superior performance in Average Precision (AP) and Mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA), establishing new benchmarks for accident prediction technology. Our approach not only advances the technological framework for autonomous driving safety but also enhances human-AI interaction, making predictive insights generated by autonomous systems more intuitive and actionable.

CRASH: Crash Recognition and Anticipation System Harnessing with Context-Aware and Temporal Focus Attentions

Accurately and promptly predicting accidents among surrounding traffic agents from camera footage is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). This task presents substantial challenges stemming from the unpredictable nature of traffic accidents, their long-tail distribution, the intricacies of traffic scene dynamics, and the inherently constrained field of vision of onboard cameras. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel accident anticipation framework for AVs, termed CRASH. It seamlessly integrates five components: object detector, feature extractor, object-aware module, context-aware module, and multi-layer fusion. Specifically, we develop the object-aware module to prioritize high-risk objects in complex and ambiguous environments by calculating the spatial-temporal relationships between traffic agents. In parallel, the context-aware is also devised to extend global visual information from the temporal to the frequency domain using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and capture fine-grained visual features of potential objects and broader context cues within traffic scenes. To capture a wider range of visual cues, we further propose a multi-layer fusion that dynamically computes the temporal dependencies between different scenes and iteratively updates the correlations between different visual features for accurate and timely accident prediction. Evaluated on real-world datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D) datasets--our model surpasses existing top baselines in critical evaluation metrics like Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA). Importantly, its robustness and adaptability are particularly evident in challenging driving scenarios with missing or limited training data, demonstrating significant potential for application in real-world autonomous driving systems.

Less is More: Efficient Brain-Inspired Learning for Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction

Accurately and safely predicting the trajectories of surrounding vehicles is essential for fully realizing autonomous driving (AD). This paper presents the Human-Like Trajectory Prediction model (HLTP++), which emulates human cognitive processes to improve trajectory prediction in AD. HLTP++ incorporates a novel teacher-student knowledge distillation framework. The "teacher" model equipped with an adaptive visual sector, mimics the dynamic allocation of attention human drivers exhibit based on factors like spatial orientation, proximity, and driving speed. On the other hand, the "student" model focuses on real-time interaction and human decision-making, drawing parallels to the human memory storage mechanism. Furthermore, we improve the model's efficiency by introducing a new Fourier Adaptive Spike Neural Network (FA-SNN), allowing for faster and more precise predictions with fewer parameters. Evaluated using the NGSIM, HighD, and MoCAD benchmarks, HLTP++ demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, which reduces the predicted trajectory error with over 11% on the NGSIM dataset and 25% on the HighD datasets. Moreover, HLTP++ demonstrates strong adaptability in challenging environments with incomplete input data. This marks a significant stride in the journey towards fully AD systems.

Characterized Diffusion and Spatial-Temporal Interaction Network for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Trajectory prediction is a cornerstone in autonomous driving (AD), playing a critical role in enabling vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in dynamic environments. To address this task, this paper presents a novel trajectory prediction model tailored for accuracy in the face of heterogeneous and uncertain traffic scenarios. At the heart of this model lies the Characterized Diffusion Module, an innovative module designed to simulate traffic scenarios with inherent uncertainty. This module enriches the predictive process by infusing it with detailed semantic information, thereby enhancing trajectory prediction accuracy. Complementing this, our Spatio-Temporal (ST) Interaction Module captures the nuanced effects of traffic scenarios on vehicle dynamics across both spatial and temporal dimensions with remarkable effectiveness. Demonstrated through exhaustive evaluations, our model sets a new standard in trajectory prediction, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM), Highway Drone (HighD), and Macao Connected Autonomous Driving (MoCAD) datasets across both short and extended temporal spans. This performance underscores the model's unparalleled adaptability and efficacy in navigating complex traffic scenarios, including highways, urban streets, and intersections.