GameFormer: Game-theoretic Modeling and Learning of Transformer-based Interactive Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles operating in complex real-world environments require accurate predictions of interactive behaviors between traffic participants. While existing works focus on modeling agent interactions based on their past trajectories, their future interactions are often ignored. This paper addresses the interaction prediction problem by formulating it with hierarchical game theory and proposing the GameFormer framework to implement it. Specifically, we present a novel Transformer decoder structure that uses the prediction results from the previous level together with the common environment background to iteratively refine the interaction process. Moreover, we propose a learning process that regulates an agent's behavior at the current level to respond to other agents' behaviors from the last level. Through experiments on a large-scale real-world driving dataset, we demonstrate that our model can achieve state-of-the-art prediction accuracy on the interaction prediction task. We also validate the model's capability to jointly reason about the ego agent's motion plans and other agents' behaviors in both open-loop and closed-loop planning tests, outperforming a variety of baseline methods.