Uncertainty-Aware Prediction and Application in Planning for Autonomous Driving: Definitions, Methods, and Comparison

Autonomous driving systems face the formidable challenge of navigating intricate and dynamic environments with uncertainty. This study presents a unified prediction and planning framework that concurrently models short-term aleatoric uncertainty (SAU), long-term aleatoric uncertainty (LAU), and epistemic uncertainty (EU) to predict and establish a robust foundation for planning in dynamic contexts. The framework uses Gaussian mixture models and deep ensemble methods, to concurrently capture and assess SAU, LAU, and EU, where traditional methods do not integrate these uncertainties simultaneously. Additionally, uncertainty-aware planning is introduced, considering various uncertainties. The study's contributions include comparisons of uncertainty estimations, risk modeling, and planning methods in comparison to existing approaches. The proposed methods were rigorously evaluated using the CommonRoad benchmark and settings with limited perception. These experiments illuminated the advantages and roles of different uncertainty factors in autonomous driving processes. In addition, comparative assessments of various uncertainty modeling strategies underscore the benefits of modeling multiple types of uncertainties, thus enhancing planning accuracy and reliability. The proposed framework facilitates the development of methods for UAP and surpasses existing uncertainty-aware risk models, particularly when considering diverse traffic scenarios. Project page: https://swb19.github.io/UAP/.

Scientific Preparation for CSST: Classification of Galaxy and Nebula/Star Cluster Based on Deep Learning

The Chinese Space Station Telescope (abbreviated as CSST) is a future advanced space telescope. Real-time identification of galaxy and nebula/star cluster (abbreviated as NSC) images is of great value during CSST survey. While recent research on celestial object recognition has progressed, the rapid and efficient identification of high-resolution local celestial images remains challenging. In this study, we conducted galaxy and NSC image classification research using deep learning methods based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope. We built a Local Celestial Image Dataset and designed a deep learning model named HR-CelestialNet for classifying images of the galaxy and NSC. HR-CelestialNet achieved an accuracy of 89.09% on the testing set, outperforming models such as AlexNet, VGGNet and ResNet, while demonstrating faster recognition speeds. Furthermore, we investigated the factors influencing CSST image quality and evaluated the generalization ability of HR-CelestialNet on the blurry image dataset, demonstrating its robustness to low image quality. The proposed method can enable real-time identification of celestial images during CSST survey mission.

Identify, Estimate and Bound the Uncertainty of Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for developing more intelligent autonomous vehicles (AVs). A typical DRL application on AVs is to train a neural network-based driving policy. However, the black-box nature of neural networks can result in unpredictable decision failures, making such AVs unreliable. To this end, this work proposes a method to identify and protect unreliable decisions of a DRL driving policy. The basic idea is to estimate and constrain the policy's performance uncertainty, which quantifies potential performance drop due to insufficient training data or network fitting errors. By constraining the uncertainty, the DRL model's performance is always greater than that of a baseline policy. The uncertainty caused by insufficient data is estimated by the bootstrapped method. Then, the uncertainty caused by the network fitting error is estimated using an ensemble network. Finally, a baseline policy is added as the performance lower bound to avoid potential decision failures. The overall framework is called uncertainty-bound reinforcement learning (UBRL). The proposed UBRL is evaluated on DRL policies with different amounts of training data, taking an unprotected left-turn driving case as an example. The result shows that the UBRL method can identify potentially unreliable decisions of DRL policy. The UBRL guarantees to outperform baseline policy even when the DRL policy is not well-trained and has high uncertainty. Meanwhile, the performance of UBRL improves with more training data. Such a method is valuable for the DRL application on real-road driving and provides a metric to evaluate a DRL policy.

Dynamically Conservative Self-Driving Planner for Long-Tail Cases

Self-driving vehicles (SDVs) are becoming reality but still suffer from "long-tail" challenges during natural driving: the SDVs will continually encounter rare, safety-critical cases that may not be included in the dataset they were trained. Some safety-assurance planners solve this problem by being conservative in all possible cases, which may significantly affect driving mobility. To this end, this work proposes a method to automatically adjust the conservative level according to each case's "long-tail" rate, named dynamically conservative planner (DCP). We first define the "long-tail" rate as an SDV's confidence to pass a driving case. The rate indicates the probability of safe-critical events and is estimated using the statistics bootstrapped method with historical data. Then, a reinforcement learning-based planner is designed to contain candidate policies with different conservative levels. The final policy is optimized based on the estimated "long-tail" rate. In this way, the DCP is designed to automatically adjust to be more conservative in low-confidence "long-tail" cases while keeping efficient otherwise. The DCP is evaluated in the CARLA simulator using driving cases with "long-tail" distributed training data. The results show that the DCP can accurately estimate the "long-tail" rate to identify potential risks. Based on the rate, the DCP automatically avoids potential collisions in "long-tail" cases using conservative decisions while not affecting the average velocity in other typical cases. Thus, the DCP is safer and more efficient than the baselines with fixed conservative levels, e.g., an always conservative planner. This work provides a technique to guarantee SDV's performance in unexpected driving cases without resorting to a global conservative setting, which contributes to solving the "long-tail" problem practically.

Privacy of Autonomous Vehicles: Risks, Protection Methods, and Future Directions

Recent advances in machine learning have enabled its wide application in different domains, and one of the most exciting applications is autonomous vehicles (AVs), which have encouraged the development of a number of ML algorithms from perception to prediction to planning. However, training AVs usually requires a large amount of training data collected from different driving environments (e.g., cities) as well as different types of personal information (e.g., working hours and routes). Such collected large data, treated as the new oil for ML in the data-centric AI era, usually contains a large amount of privacy-sensitive information which is hard to remove or even audit. Although existing privacy protection approaches have achieved certain theoretical and empirical success, there is still a gap when applying them to real-world applications such as autonomous vehicles. For instance, when training AVs, not only can individually identifiable information reveal privacy-sensitive information, but also population-level information such as road construction within a city, and proprietary-level commercial secrets of AVs. Thus, it is critical to revisit the frontier of privacy risks and corresponding protection approaches in AVs to bridge this gap. Following this goal, in this work, we provide a new taxonomy for privacy risks and protection methods in AVs, and we categorize privacy in AVs into three levels: individual, population, and proprietary. We explicitly list out recent challenges to protect each of these levels of privacy, summarize existing solutions to these challenges, discuss the lessons and conclusions, and provide potential future directions and opportunities for both researchers and practitioners. We believe this work will help to shape the privacy research in AV and guide the privacy protection technology design.

Long-Tail Prediction Uncertainty Aware Trajectory Planning for Self-driving Vehicles

A typical trajectory planner of autonomous driving usually relies on predicting the future behavior of surrounding obstacles. In recent years, prediction models based on deep learning have been widely used due to their impressive performance. However, recent studies have shown that deep learning models trained on a dataset following a long-tailed driving scenario distribution will suffer from large prediction errors in the "tails," which might lead to failures of the planner. To this end, this work defines a notion of prediction model uncertainty to quantify high errors due to sparse data. Moreover, this work proposes a trajectory planner to consider such prediction uncertainty for safer performance. Firstly, the prediction model's uncertainty due to insufficient training data is estimated by an ensemble network structure. Then a trajectory planner is designed to consider the worst-case arising from prediction uncertainty. The results show that the proposed method can improve the safety of trajectory planning under the prediction uncertainty caused by insufficient data. At the same time, with sufficient data, the framework will not lead to overly conservative results. This technology helps to improve the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles under the long-tail data distribution of the real world.

Road Traffic Law Adaptive Decision-making for Self-Driving Vehicles

Self-driving vehicles have their own intelligence to drive on open roads. However, vehicle managers, e.g., government or industrial companies, still need a way to tell these self-driving vehicles what behaviors are encouraged or forbidden. Unlike human drivers, current self-driving vehicles cannot understand the traffic laws, thus rely on the programmers manually writing the corresponding principles into the driving systems. It would be less efficient and hard to adapt some temporary traffic laws, especially when the vehicles use data-driven decision-making algorithms. Besides, current self-driving vehicle systems rarely take traffic law modification into consideration. This work aims to design a road traffic law adaptive decision-making method. The decision-making algorithm is designed based on reinforcement learning, in which the traffic rules are usually implicitly coded in deep neural networks. The main idea is to supply the adaptability to traffic laws of self-driving vehicles by a law-adaptive backup policy. In this work, the natural language-based traffic laws are first translated into a logical expression by the Linear Temporal Logic method. Then, the system will try to monitor in advance whether the self-driving vehicle may break the traffic laws by designing a long-term RL action space. Finally, a sample-based planning method will re-plan the trajectory when the vehicle may break the traffic rules. The method is validated in a Beijing Winter Olympic Lane scenario and an overtaking case, built in CARLA simulator. The results show that by adopting this method, the self-driving vehicles can comply with new issued or updated traffic laws effectively. This method helps self-driving vehicles governed by digital traffic laws, which is necessary for the wide adoption of autonomous driving.

Multi-Agent Vulnerability Discovery for Autonomous Driving with Hazard Arbitration Reward

Discovering hazardous scenarios is crucial in testing and further improving driving policies. However, conducting efficient driving policy testing faces two key challenges. On the one hand, the probability of naturally encountering hazardous scenarios is low when testing a well-trained autonomous driving strategy. Thus, discovering these scenarios by purely real-world road testing is extremely costly. On the other hand, a proper determination of accident responsibility is necessary for this task. Collecting scenarios with wrong-attributed responsibilities will lead to an overly conservative autonomous driving strategy. To be more specific, we aim to discover hazardous scenarios that are autonomous-vehicle responsible (AV-responsible), i.e., the vulnerabilities of the under-test driving policy. To this end, this work proposes a Safety Test framework by finding Av-Responsible Scenarios (STARS) based on multi-agent reinforcement learning. STARS guides other traffic participants to produce Av-Responsible Scenarios and make the under-test driving policy misbehave via introducing Hazard Arbitration Reward (HAR). HAR enables our framework to discover diverse, complex, and AV-responsible hazardous scenarios. Experimental results against four different driving policies in three environments demonstrate that STARS can effectively discover AV-responsible hazardous scenarios. These scenarios indeed correspond to the vulnerabilities of the under-test driving policies, thus are meaningful for their further improvements.

Sill-Net: Feature Augmentation with Separated Illumination Representation

For visual object recognition tasks, the illumination variations can cause distinct changes in object appearance and thus confuse the deep neural network based recognition models. Especially for some rare illumination conditions, collecting sufficient training samples could be time-consuming and expensive. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a novel neural network architecture called Separating-Illumination Network (Sill-Net). Sill-Net learns to separate illumination features from images, and then during training we augment training samples with these separated illumination features in the feature space. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in several object classification benchmarks.

Driving-Policy Adaptive Safeguard for Autonomous Vehicles Using Reinforcement Learning

Safeguard functions such as those provided by advanced emergency braking (AEB) can provide another layer of safety for autonomous vehicles (AV). A smart safeguard function should adapt the activation conditions to the driving policy, to avoid unnecessary interventions as well as improve vehicle safety. This paper proposes a driving-policy adaptive safeguard (DPAS) design, including a collision avoidance strategy and an activation function. The collision avoidance strategy is designed in a reinforcement learning framework, obtained by Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). It can learn from past collisions and manipulate both braking and steering in stochastic traffics. The driving-policy adaptive activation function should dynamically assess current driving policy risk and kick in when an urgent threat is detected. To generate this activation function, MCTS' exploration and rollout modules are designed to fully evaluate the AV's current driving policy, and then explore other safer actions. In this study, the DPAS is validated with two typical highway-driving policies. The results are obtained through and 90,000 times in the stochastic and aggressive simulated traffic. The results are calibrated by naturalistic driving data and show that the proposed safeguard reduces the collision rate significantly without introducing more interventions, compared with the state-based benchmark safeguards. In summary, the proposed safeguard leverages the learning-based method in stochastic and emergent scenarios and imposes minimal influence on the driving policy.