Hypergraph-based Motion Generation with Multi-modal Interaction Relational Reasoning

The intricate nature of real-world driving environments, characterized by dynamic and diverse interactions among multiple vehicles and their possible future states, presents considerable challenges in accurately predicting the motion states of vehicles and handling the uncertainty inherent in the predictions. Addressing these challenges requires comprehensive modeling and reasoning to capture the implicit relations among vehicles and the corresponding diverse behaviors. This research introduces an integrated framework for autonomous vehicles (AVs) motion prediction to address these complexities, utilizing a novel Relational Hypergraph Interaction-informed Neural mOtion generator (RHINO). RHINO leverages hypergraph-based relational reasoning by integrating a multi-scale hypergraph neural network to model group-wise interactions among multiple vehicles and their multi-modal driving behaviors, thereby enhancing motion prediction accuracy and reliability. Experimental validation using real-world datasets demonstrates the superior performance of this framework in improving predictive accuracy and fostering socially aware automated driving in dynamic traffic scenarios.

V2X-VLM: End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving Through Large Vision-Language Models

Advancements in autonomous driving have increasingly focused on end-to-end (E2E) systems that manage the full spectrum of driving tasks, from environmental perception to vehicle navigation and control. This paper introduces V2X-VLM, an innovative E2E vehicle-infrastructure cooperative autonomous driving (VICAD) framework with large vision-language models (VLMs). V2X-VLM is designed to enhance situational awareness, decision-making, and ultimate trajectory planning by integrating data from vehicle-mounted cameras, infrastructure sensors, and textual information. The strength of the comprehensive multimodel data fusion of the VLM enables precise and safe E2E trajectory planning in complex and dynamic driving scenarios. Validation on the DAIR-V2X dataset demonstrates that V2X-VLM outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in cooperative autonomous driving.

VLM-MPC: Vision Language Foundation Model (VLM)-Guided Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for Autonomous Driving

Motivated by the emergent reasoning capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) and its potential to improve the comprehensibility of autonomous driving systems, this paper introduces a closed-loop autonomous driving controller called VLM-MPC, which combines a VLM for high-level decision-making and a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for low-level vehicle control. The proposed VLM-MPC system is structurally divided into two asynchronous components: an upper-level VLM and a lower-level MPC. The upper layer VLM generates driving parameters for lower-level control based on front camera images, ego vehicle state, traffic environment conditions, and reference memory. The lower-level MPC controls the vehicle in real-time using these parameters, considering engine lag and providing state feedback to the entire system. Experiments based on the nuScenes dataset validated the effectiveness of the proposed VLM-MPC system across various scenarios (e.g., night, rain, intersections). Results showed that the VLM-MPC system consistently outperformed baseline models in terms of safety and driving comfort. By comparing behaviors under different weather conditions and scenarios, we demonstrated the VLM's ability to understand the environment and make reasonable inferences.

Physically Analyzable AI-Based Nonlinear Platoon Dynamics Modeling During Traffic Oscillation: A Koopman Approach

Given the complexity and nonlinearity inherent in traffic dynamics within vehicular platoons, there exists a critical need for a modeling methodology with high accuracy while concurrently achieving physical analyzability. Currently, there are two predominant approaches: the physics model-based approach and the Artificial Intelligence (AI)--based approach. Knowing the facts that the physical-based model usually lacks sufficient modeling accuracy and potential function mismatches and the pure-AI-based method lacks analyzability, this paper innovatively proposes an AI-based Koopman approach to model the unknown nonlinear platoon dynamics harnessing the power of AI and simultaneously maintain physical analyzability, with a particular focus on periods of traffic oscillation. Specifically, this research first employs a deep learning framework to generate the embedding function that lifts the original space into the embedding space. Given the embedding space descriptiveness, the platoon dynamics can be expressed as a linear dynamical system founded by the Koopman theory. Based on that, the routine of linear dynamical system analysis can be conducted on the learned traffic linear dynamics in the embedding space. By that, the physical interpretability and analyzability of model-based methods with the heightened precision inherent in data-driven approaches can be synergized. Comparative experiments have been conducted with existing modeling approaches, which suggests our method's superiority in accuracy. Additionally, a phase plane analysis is performed, further evidencing our approach's effectiveness in replicating the complex dynamic patterns. Moreover, the proposed methodology is proven to feature the capability of analyzing the stability, attesting to the physical analyzability.

Crossfusor: A Cross-Attention Transformer Enhanced Conditional Diffusion Model for Car-Following Trajectory Prediction

Vehicle trajectory prediction is crucial for advancing autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), enhancing road safety and traffic efficiency. While traditional methods have laid foundational work, modern deep learning techniques, particularly transformer-based models and generative approaches, have significantly improved prediction accuracy by capturing complex and non-linear patterns in vehicle motion and traffic interactions. However, these models often overlook the detailed car-following behaviors and inter-vehicle interactions essential for real-world driving scenarios. This study introduces a Cross-Attention Transformer Enhanced Conditional Diffusion Model (Crossfusor) specifically designed for car-following trajectory prediction. Crossfusor integrates detailed inter-vehicular interactions and car-following dynamics into a robust diffusion framework, improving both the accuracy and realism of predicted trajectories. The model leverages a novel temporal feature encoding framework combining GRU, location-based attention mechanisms, and Fourier embedding to capture historical vehicle dynamics. It employs noise scaled by these encoded historical features in the forward diffusion process, and uses a cross-attention transformer to model intricate inter-vehicle dependencies in the reverse denoising process. Experimental results on the NGSIM dataset demonstrate that Crossfusor outperforms state-of-the-art models, particularly in long-term predictions, showcasing its potential for enhancing the predictive capabilities of autonomous driving systems.

Optimizing Bus Travel: A Novel Approach to Feature Mining with P-KMEANS and P-LDA Algorithms

Customizing services for bus travel can bolster its attractiveness, optimize usage, alleviate traffic congestion, and diminish carbon emissions. This potential is realized by harnessing recent advancements in positioning communication facilities, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence for feature mining in public transportation. However, the inherent complexities of disorganized and unstructured public transportation data introduce substantial challenges to travel feature extraction. This study presents a bus travel feature extraction method rooted in Point of Interest (POI) data, employing enhanced P-KMENAS and P-LDA algorithms to overcome these limitations. While the KMEANS algorithm adeptly segments passenger travel paths into distinct clusters, its outcomes can be influenced by the initial K value. On the other hand, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) excels at feature identification and probabilistic interpretations yet encounters difficulties with feature intermingling and nuanced sub-feature interactions. Incorporating the POI dimension enhances our understanding of travel behavior, aligning it more closely with passenger attributes and facilitating easier data analysis. By incorporating POI data, our refined P-KMENAS and P-LDA algorithms grant a holistic insight into travel behaviors and attributes, effectively mitigating the limitations above. Consequently, this POI-centric algorithm effectively amalgamates diverse POI attributes, delineates varied travel contexts, and imparts probabilistic metrics to feature properties. Our method successfully mines the diverse aspects of bus travel, such as age, occupation, gender, sports, cost, safety, and personality traits. It effectively calculates relationships between individual travel behaviors and assigns explanatory and evaluative probabilities to POI labels, thereby enhancing bus travel optimization.

A Physics Enhanced Residual Learning (PERL) Framework for Traffic State Prediction

In vehicle trajectory prediction, physics models and data-driven models are two predominant methodologies. However, each approach presents its own set of challenges: physics models fall short in predictability, while data-driven models lack interpretability. Addressing these identified shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel framework, the Physics-Enhanced Residual Learning (PERL) model. PERL integrates the strengths of physics-based and data-driven methods for traffic state prediction. PERL contains a physics model and a residual learning model. Its prediction is the sum of the physics model result and a predicted residual as a correction to it. It preserves the interpretability inherent to physics-based models and has reduced data requirements compared to data-driven methods. Experiments were conducted using a real-world vehicle trajectory dataset. We proposed a PERL model, with the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) as its physics car-following model and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as its residual learning model. We compare this PERL model with the physics car-following model, data-driven model, and other physics-informed neural network (PINN) models. The result reveals that PERL achieves better prediction with a small dataset, compared to the physics model, data-driven model, and PINN model. Second, the PERL model showed faster convergence during training, offering comparable performance with fewer training samples than the data-driven model and PINN model. Sensitivity analysis also proves comparable performance of PERL using another residual learning model and a physics car-following model.

Graph-Based Interaction-Aware Multimodal 2D Vehicle Trajectory Prediction using Diffusion Graph Convolutional Networks

Predicting vehicle trajectories is crucial for ensuring automated vehicle operation efficiency and safety, particularly on congested multi-lane highways. In such dynamic environments, a vehicle's motion is determined by its historical behaviors as well as interactions with surrounding vehicles. These intricate interactions arise from unpredictable motion patterns, leading to a wide range of driving behaviors that warrant in-depth investigation. This study presents the Graph-based Interaction-aware Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction (GIMTP) framework, designed to probabilistically predict future vehicle trajectories by effectively capturing these interactions. Within this framework, vehicles' motions are conceptualized as nodes in a time-varying graph, and the traffic interactions are represented by a dynamic adjacency matrix. To holistically capture both spatial and temporal dependencies embedded in this dynamic adjacency matrix, the methodology incorporates the Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (DGCN), thereby providing a graph embedding of both historical states and future states. Furthermore, we employ a driving intention-specific feature fusion, enabling the adaptive integration of historical and future embeddings for enhanced intention recognition and trajectory prediction. This model gives two-dimensional predictions for each mode of longitudinal and lateral driving behaviors and offers probabilistic future paths with corresponding probabilities, addressing the challenges of complex vehicle interactions and multi-modality of driving behaviors. Validation using real-world trajectory datasets demonstrates the efficiency and potential.