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).

KoMA: Knowledge-driven Multi-agent Framework for Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents offer a novel avenue for tackling real-world challenges through a knowledge-driven manner. These LLM-enhanced methodologies excel in generalization and interpretability. However, the complexity of driving tasks often necessitates the collaboration of multiple, heterogeneous agents, underscoring the need for such LLM-driven agents to engage in cooperative knowledge sharing and cognitive synergy. Despite the promise of LLMs, current applications predominantly center around single agent scenarios. To broaden the horizons of knowledge-driven strategies and bolster the generalization capabilities of autonomous agents, we propose the KoMA framework consisting of multi-agent interaction, multi-step planning, shared-memory, and ranking-based reflection modules to enhance multi-agents' decision-making in complex driving scenarios. Based on the framework's generated text descriptions of driving scenarios, the multi-agent interaction module enables LLM agents to analyze and infer the intentions of surrounding vehicles, akin to human cognition. The multi-step planning module enables LLM agents to analyze and obtain final action decisions layer by layer to ensure consistent goals for short-term action decisions. The shared memory module can accumulate collective experience to make superior decisions, and the ranking-based reflection module can evaluate and improve agent behavior with the aim of enhancing driving safety and efficiency. The KoMA framework not only enhances the robustness and adaptability of autonomous driving agents but also significantly elevates their generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over traditional methods, particularly in its ability to handle complex, unpredictable driving environments without extensive retraining.

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.

OccSora: 4D Occupancy Generation Models as World Simulators for Autonomous Driving

Understanding the evolution of 3D scenes is important for effective autonomous driving. While conventional methods mode scene development with the motion of individual instances, world models emerge as a generative framework to describe the general scene dynamics. However, most existing methods adopt an autoregressive framework to perform next-token prediction, which suffer from inefficiency in modeling long-term temporal evolutions. To address this, we propose a diffusion-based 4D occupancy generation model, OccSora, to simulate the development of the 3D world for autonomous driving. We employ a 4D scene tokenizer to obtain compact discrete spatial-temporal representations for 4D occupancy input and achieve high-quality reconstruction for long-sequence occupancy videos. We then learn a diffusion transformer on the spatial-temporal representations and generate 4D occupancy conditioned on a trajectory prompt. We conduct extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes dataset with Occ3D occupancy annotations. OccSora can generate 16s-videos with authentic 3D layout and temporal consistency, demonstrating its ability to understand the spatial and temporal distributions of driving scenes. With trajectory-aware 4D generation, OccSora has the potential to serve as a world simulator for the decision-making of autonomous driving. Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/OccSora.

Traj-LLM: A New Exploration for Empowering Trajectory Prediction with Pre-trained Large Language Models

Predicting the future trajectories of dynamic traffic actors is a cornerstone task in autonomous driving. Though existing notable efforts have resulted in impressive performance improvements, a gap persists in scene cognitive and understanding of the complex traffic semantics. This paper proposes Traj-LLM, the first to investigate the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) without explicit prompt engineering to generate future motion from agents' past/observed trajectories and scene semantics. Traj-LLM starts with sparse context joint coding to dissect the agent and scene features into a form that LLMs understand. On this basis, we innovatively explore LLMs' powerful comprehension abilities to capture a spectrum of high-level scene knowledge and interactive information. Emulating the human-like lane focus cognitive function and enhancing Traj-LLM's scene comprehension, we introduce lane-aware probabilistic learning powered by the pioneering Mamba module. Finally, a multi-modal Laplace decoder is designed to achieve scene-compliant multi-modal predictions. Extensive experiments manifest that Traj-LLM, fortified by LLMs' strong prior knowledge and understanding prowess, together with lane-aware probability learning, outstrips state-of-the-art methods across evaluation metrics. Moreover, the few-shot analysis further substantiates Traj-LLM's performance, wherein with just 50% of the dataset, it outperforms the majority of benchmarks relying on complete data utilization. This study explores equipping the trajectory prediction task with advanced capabilities inherent in LLMs, furnishing a more universal and adaptable solution for forecasting agent motion in a new way.

A Cognitive-Driven Trajectory Prediction Model for Autonomous Driving in Mixed Autonomy Environment

As autonomous driving technology progresses, the need for precise trajectory prediction models becomes paramount. This paper introduces an innovative model that infuses cognitive insights into trajectory prediction, focusing on perceived safety and dynamic decision-making. Distinct from traditional approaches, our model excels in analyzing interactions and behavior patterns in mixed autonomy traffic scenarios. It represents a significant leap forward, achieving marked performance improvements on several key datasets. Specifically, it surpasses existing benchmarks with gains of 16.2% on the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM), 27.4% on the Highway Drone (HighD), and 19.8% on the Macao Connected Autonomous Driving (MoCAD) dataset. Our proposed model shows exceptional proficiency in handling corner cases, essential for real-world applications. Moreover, its robustness is evident in scenarios with missing or limited data, outperforming most of the state-of-the-art baselines. This adaptability and resilience position our model as a viable tool for real-world autonomous driving systems, heralding a new standard in vehicle trajectory prediction for enhanced safety and efficiency.

TPLLM: A Traffic Prediction Framework Based on Pretrained Large Language Models

Traffic prediction constitutes a pivotal facet within the purview of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and the attainment of highly precise predictions holds profound significance for efficacious traffic management. The precision of prevailing deep learning-driven traffic prediction models typically sees an upward trend with a rise in the volume of training data. However, the procurement of comprehensive spatiotemporal datasets for traffic is often fraught with challenges, primarily stemming from the substantial costs associated with data collection and retention. Consequently, developing a model that can achieve accurate predictions and good generalization ability in areas with limited historical traffic data is a challenging problem. It is noteworthy that the rapidly advancing pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) of recent years have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in cross-modality knowledge transfer and few-shot learning. Recognizing the sequential nature of traffic data, similar to language, we introduce TPLLM, a novel traffic prediction framework leveraging LLMs. In this framework, we construct a sequence embedding layer based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and a graph embedding layer based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to extract sequence features and spatial features, respectively. These are subsequently integrated to form inputs that are suitable for LLMs. A Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning approach is applied to TPLLM, thereby facilitating efficient learning and minimizing computational demands. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that TPLLM exhibits commendable performance in both full-sample and few-shot prediction scenarios, effectively supporting the development of ITS in regions with scarce historical traffic data.

A Cognitive-Based Trajectory Prediction Approach for Autonomous Driving

In autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, the ability to accurately predict the movements of surrounding vehicles is paramount for ensuring safety and operational efficiency. Incorporating human decision-making insights enables AVs to more effectively anticipate the potential actions of other vehicles, significantly improving prediction accuracy and responsiveness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces the Human-Like Trajectory Prediction (HLTP) model, which adopts a teacher-student knowledge distillation framework inspired by human cognitive processes. The HLTP model incorporates a sophisticated teacher-student knowledge distillation framework. The "teacher" model, equipped with an adaptive visual sector, mimics the visual processing of the human brain, particularly the functions of the occipital and temporal lobes. The "student" model focuses on real-time interaction and decision-making, drawing parallels to prefrontal and parietal cortex functions. This approach allows for dynamic adaptation to changing driving scenarios, capturing essential perceptual cues for accurate prediction. Evaluated using the Macao Connected and Autonomous Driving (MoCAD) dataset, along with the NGSIM and HighD benchmarks, HLTP demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, particularly in challenging environments with incomplete data. The project page is available at Github.

Inferring Heterogeneous Treatment Effects of Crashes on Highway Traffic: A Doubly Robust Causal Machine Learning Approach

Highway traffic crashes exert a considerable impact on both transportation systems and the economy. In this context, accurate and dependable emergency responses are crucial for effective traffic management. However, the influence of crashes on traffic status varies across diverse factors and may be biased due to selection bias. Therefore, there arises a necessity to accurately estimate the heterogeneous causal effects of crashes, thereby providing essential insights to facilitate individual-level emergency decision-making. This paper proposes a novel causal machine learning framework to estimate the causal effect of different types of crashes on highway speed. The Neyman-Rubin Causal Model (RCM) is employed to formulate this problem from a causal perspective. The Conditional Shapley Value Index (CSVI) is proposed based on causal graph theory to filter adverse variables, and the Structural Causal Model (SCM) is then adopted to define the statistical estimand for causal effects. The treatment effects are estimated by Doubly Robust Learning (DRL) methods, which combine doubly robust causal inference with classification and regression machine learning models. Experimental results from 4815 crashes on Highway Interstate 5 in Washington State reveal the heterogeneous treatment effects of crashes at varying distances and durations. The rear-end crashes cause more severe congestion and longer durations than other types of crashes, and the sideswipe crashes have the longest delayed impact. Additionally, the findings show that rear-end crashes affect traffic greater at night, while crash to objects has the most significant influence during peak hours. Statistical hypothesis tests, error metrics based on matched "counterfactual outcomes", and sensitive analyses are employed for assessment, and the results validate the accuracy and effectiveness of our method.

AccidentGPT: Accident Analysis and Prevention from V2X Environmental Perception with Multi-modal Large Model

Traffic accidents, being a significant contributor to both human casualties and property damage, have long been a focal point of research for many scholars in the field of traffic safety. However, previous studies, whether focusing on static environmental assessments or dynamic driving analyses, as well as pre-accident predictions or post-accident rule analyses, have typically been conducted in isolation. There has been a lack of an effective framework for developing a comprehensive understanding and application of traffic safety. To address this gap, this paper introduces AccidentGPT, a comprehensive accident analysis and prevention multi-modal large model. AccidentGPT establishes a multi-modal information interaction framework grounded in multi-sensor perception, thereby enabling a holistic approach to accident analysis and prevention in the field of traffic safety. Specifically, our capabilities can be categorized as follows: for autonomous driving vehicles, we provide comprehensive environmental perception and understanding to control the vehicle and avoid collisions. For human-driven vehicles, we offer proactive long-range safety warnings and blind-spot alerts while also providing safety driving recommendations and behavioral norms through human-machine dialogue and interaction. Additionally, for traffic police and management agencies, our framework supports intelligent and real-time analysis of traffic safety, encompassing pedestrian, vehicles, roads, and the environment through collaborative perception from multiple vehicles and road testing devices. The system is also capable of providing a thorough analysis of accident causes and liability after vehicle collisions. Our framework stands as the first large model to integrate comprehensive scene understanding into traffic safety studies. Project page: https://accidentgpt.github.io