Joakim Johnander

Sandra Carrasco Limeros, Sylwia Majchrowska, Joakim Johnander et al.

Motion prediction systems aim to capture the future behavior of traffic scenarios enabling autonomous vehicles to perform safe and efficient planning. The evolution of these scenarios is highly uncertain and depends on the interactions of agents with static and dynamic objects in the scene. GNN-based approaches have recently gained attention as they are well suited to naturally model these interactions. However, one of the main challenges that remains unexplored is how to address the complexity and opacity of these models in order to deal with the transparency requirements for autonomous driving systems, which includes aspects such as interpretability and explainability. In this work, we aim to improve the explainability of motion prediction systems by using different approaches. First, we propose a new Explainable Heterogeneous Graph-based Policy (XHGP) model based on an heterograph representation of the traffic scene and lane-graph traversals, which learns interaction behaviors using object-level and type-level attention. This learned attention provides information about the most important agents and interactions in the scene. Second, we explore this same idea with the explanations provided by GNNExplainer. Third, we apply counterfactual reasoning to provide explanations of selected individual scenarios by exploring the sensitivity of the trained model to changes made to the input data, i.e., masking some elements of the scene, modifying trajectories, and adding or removing dynamic agents. The explainability analysis provided in this paper is a first step towards more transparent and reliable motion prediction systems, important from the perspective of the user, developers and regulatory agencies. The code to reproduce this work is publicly available at https://github.com/sancarlim/Explainable-MP/tree/v1.1.

William Ljungbergh, Joakim Johnander, Christoffer Petersson et al.

Images fed to a deep neural network have in general undergone several handcrafted image signal processing (ISP) operations, all of which have been optimized to produce visually pleasing images. In this work, we investigate the hypothesis that the intermediate representation of visually pleasing images is sub-optimal for downstream computer vision tasks compared to the RAW image representation. We suggest that the operations of the ISP instead should be optimized towards the end task, by learning the parameters of the operations jointly during training. We extend previous works on this topic and propose a new learnable operation that enables an object detector to achieve superior performance when compared to both previous works and traditional RGB images. In experiments on the open PASCALRAW dataset, we empirically confirm our hypothesis.

Adam Tonderski, Joakim Johnander, Christoffer Petersson et al.

We propose the task Future Object Detection, in which the goal is to predict the bounding boxes for all visible objects in a future video frame. While this task involves recognizing temporal and kinematic patterns, in addition to the semantic and geometric ones, it only requires annotations in the standard form for individual, single (future) frames, in contrast to expensive full sequence annotations. We propose to tackle this task with an end-to-end method, in which a detection transformer is trained to directly output the future objects. In order to make accurate predictions about the future, it is necessary to capture the dynamics in the scene, both object motion and the movement of the ego-camera. To this end, we extend existing detection transformers in two ways. First, we experiment with three different mechanisms that enable the network to spatiotemporally process multiple frames. Second, we provide ego-motion information to the model in a learnable manner. We show that both of these extensions improve the future object detection performance substantially. Our final approach learns to capture the dynamics and makes predictions on par with an oracle for prediction horizons up to 100 ms, and outperforms all baselines for longer prediction horizons. By visualizing the attention maps, we observe that a form of tracking emerges within the network. Code is available at github.com/atonderski/future-object-detection.

Sandra Carrasco Limeros, Sylwia Majchrowska, Joakim Johnander et al.

Predicting the motion of other road agents enables autonomous vehicles to perform safe and efficient path planning. This task is very complex, as the behaviour of road agents depends on many factors and the number of possible future trajectories can be considerable (multi-modal). Most prior approaches proposed to address multi-modal motion prediction are based on complex machine learning systems that have limited interpretability. Moreover, the metrics used in current benchmarks do not evaluate all aspects of the problem, such as the diversity and admissibility of the output. In this work, we aim to advance towards the design of trustworthy motion prediction systems, based on some of the requirements for the design of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. We focus on evaluation criteria, robustness, and interpretability of outputs. First, we comprehensively analyse the evaluation metrics, identify the main gaps of current benchmarks, and propose a new holistic evaluation framework. We then introduce a method for the assessment of spatial and temporal robustness by simulating noise in the perception system. To enhance the interpretability of the outputs and generate more balanced results in the proposed evaluation framework, we propose an intent prediction layer that can be attached to multi-modal motion prediction models. The effectiveness of this approach is assessed through a survey that explores different elements in the visualization of the multi-modal trajectories and intentions. The proposed approach and findings make a significant contribution to the development of trustworthy motion prediction systems for autonomous vehicles, advancing the field towards greater safety and reliability.

Ziliang Xiong, Arvi Jonnarth, Abdelrahman Eldesokey et al.

Computer vision systems that are deployed in safety-critical applications need to quantify their output uncertainty. We study regression from images to parameter values and here it is common to detect uncertainty by predicting probability distributions. In this context, we investigate the regression-by-classification paradigm which can represent multimodal distributions, without a prior assumption on the number of modes. Through experiments on a specifically designed synthetic dataset, we demonstrate that traditional loss functions lead to poor probability distribution estimates and severe overconfidence, in the absence of full ground truth distributions. In order to alleviate these issues, we propose hinge-Wasserstein -- a simple improvement of the Wasserstein loss that reduces the penalty for weak secondary modes during training. This enables prediction of complex distributions with multiple modes, and allows training on datasets where full ground truth distributions are not available. In extensive experiments, we show that the proposed loss leads to substantially better uncertainty estimation on two challenging computer vision tasks: horizon line detection and stereo disparity estimation.

William Ljungbergh, Adam Tonderski, Joakim Johnander et al.

We present a versatile NeRF-based simulator for testing autonomous driving (AD) software systems, designed with a focus on sensor-realistic closed-loop evaluation and the creation of safety-critical scenarios. The simulator learns from sequences of real-world driving sensor data and enables reconfigurations and renderings of new, unseen scenarios. In this work, we use our simulator to test the responses of AD models to safety-critical scenarios inspired by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). Our evaluation reveals that, while state-of-the-art end-to-end planners excel in nominal driving scenarios in an open-loop setting, they exhibit critical flaws when navigating our safety-critical scenarios in a closed-loop setting. This highlights the need for advancements in the safety and real-world usability of end-to-end planners. By publicly releasing our simulator and scenarios as an easy-to-run evaluation suite, we invite the research community to explore, refine, and validate their AD models in controlled, yet highly configurable and challenging sensor-realistic environments. Code and instructions can be found at https://github.com/atonderski/neuro-ncap

Isak Meding, Alexander Bodin, Adam Tonderski et al.

Ensembles of independently trained deep neural networks yield uncertainty estimates that rival Bayesian networks in performance. They also offer sizable improvements in terms of predictive performance over single models. However, deep ensembles are not commonly used in environments with limited computational budget -- such as autonomous driving -- since the complexity grows linearly with the number of ensemble members. An important observation that can be made for robotics applications, such as autonomous driving, is that data is typically sequential. For instance, when an object is to be recognized, an autonomous vehicle typically observes a sequence of images, rather than a single image. This raises the question, could the deep ensemble be spread over time? In this work, we propose and analyze Deep Ensembles Spread Over Time (DESOT). The idea is to apply only a single ensemble member to each data point in the sequence, and fuse the predictions over a sequence of data points. We implement and experiment with DESOT for traffic sign classification, where sequences of tracked image patches are to be classified. We find that DESOT obtains the benefits of deep ensembles, in terms of predictive and uncertainty estimation performance, while avoiding the added computational cost. Moreover, DESOT is simple to implement and does not require sequences during training. Finally, we find that DESOT, like deep ensembles, outperform single models for out-of-distribution detection.

Joakim Johnander, Johan Edstedt, Michael Felsberg et al.

Few-shot segmentation is a challenging dense prediction task, which entails segmenting a novel query image given only a small annotated support set. The key problem is thus to design a method that aggregates detailed information from the support set, while being robust to large variations in appearance and context. To this end, we propose a few-shot segmentation method based on dense Gaussian process (GP) regression. Given the support set, our dense GP learns the mapping from local deep image features to mask values, capable of capturing complex appearance distributions. Furthermore, it provides a principled means of capturing uncertainty, which serves as another powerful cue for the final segmentation, obtained by a CNN decoder. Instead of a one-dimensional mask output, we further exploit the end-to-end learning capabilities of our approach to learn a high-dimensional output space for the GP. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on the PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ benchmarks, achieving an absolute gain of $+8.4$ mIoU in the COCO-20$^i$ 5-shot setting. Furthermore, the segmentation quality of our approach scales gracefully when increasing the support set size, while achieving robust cross-dataset transfer. Code and trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/joakimjohnander/dgpnet}.

Ziliang Xiong, Shipeng Liu, Nathaniel Helgesen et al.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the design, training, and evaluation of end-to-end autonomous driving (AD) systems. One often overlooked aspect is the uncertainty of planned trajectories predicted by these systems, despite awareness of their own uncertainty being key to achieve safety and robustness. We propose to estimate this uncertainty by adapting loss prediction from the uncertainty quantification literature. To this end, we introduce a novel light-weight module, dubbed CATPlan, that is trained to decode motion and planning embeddings into estimates of the collision loss used to partially supervise end-to-end AD systems. During inference, these estimates are interpreted as collision risk. We evaluate CATPlan on the safety-critical, nerf-based, closed-loop benchmark NeuroNCAP and find that it manages to detect collisions with a $54.8\%$ relative improvement to average precision over a GMM-based baseline in which the predicted trajectory is compared to the forecasted trajectories of other road users. Our findings indicate that the addition of CATPlan can lead to safer end-to-end AD systems and hope that our work will spark increased interest in uncertainty quantification for such systems.

Joakim Johnander, Johan Edstedt, Martin Danelljan et al.

Few-shot segmentation is a challenging task, requiring the extraction of a generalizable representation from only a few annotated samples, in order to segment novel query images. A common approach is to model each class with a single prototype. While conceptually simple, these methods suffer when the target appearance distribution is multi-modal or not linearly separable in feature space. To tackle this issue, we propose a few-shot learner formulation based on Gaussian process (GP) regression. Through the expressivity of the GP, our approach is capable of modeling complex appearance distributions in the deep feature space. The GP provides a principled way of capturing uncertainty, which serves as another powerful cue for the final segmentation, obtained by a CNN decoder. We further exploit the end-to-end learning capabilities of our approach to learn the output space of the GP learner, ensuring a richer encoding of the segmentation mask. We perform comprehensive experimental analysis of our few-shot learner formulation. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art for 5-shot segmentation, with mIoU scores of 68.1 and 49.8 on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i, respectively

Joakim Johnander, Emil Brissman, Martin Danelljan et al.

Most existing approaches to video instance segmentation comprise multiple modules that are heuristically combined to produce the final output. Formulating a purely learning-based method instead, which models both the temporal aspect as well as a generic track management required to solve the video instance segmentation task, is a highly challenging problem. In this work, we propose a novel learning formulation, where the entire video instance segmentation problem is modelled jointly. We fit a flexible model to our formulation that, with the help of a graph neural network, processes all available new information in each frame. Past information is considered and processed via a recurrent connection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comprehensive experiments. Our approach, operating at over 25 FPS, outperforms previous video real-time methods. We further conduct detailed ablative experiments that validate the different aspects of our approach.

Joakim Johnander, Martin Danelljan, Emil Brissman et al.

One of the fundamental challenges in video object segmentation is to find an effective representation of the target and background appearance. The best performing approaches resort to extensive fine-tuning of a convolutional neural network for this purpose. Besides being prohibitively expensive, this strategy cannot be truly trained end-to-end since the online fine-tuning procedure is not integrated into the offline training of the network. To address these issues, we propose a network architecture that learns a powerful representation of the target and background appearance in a single forward pass. The introduced appearance module learns a probabilistic generative model of target and background feature distributions. Given a new image, it predicts the posterior class probabilities, providing a highly discriminative cue, which is processed in later network modules. Both the learning and prediction stages of our appearance module are fully differentiable, enabling true end-to-end training of the entire segmentation pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on three video object segmentation benchmarks. We close the gap to approaches based on online fine-tuning on DAVIS17, while operating at 15 FPS on a single GPU. Furthermore, our method outperforms all published approaches on the large-scale YouTube-VOS dataset.

Goutam Bhat, Joakim Johnander, Martin Danelljan et al.

In the field of generic object tracking numerous attempts have been made to exploit deep features. Despite all expectations, deep trackers are yet to reach an outstanding level of performance compared to methods solely based on handcrafted features. In this paper, we investigate this key issue and propose an approach to unlock the true potential of deep features for tracking. We systematically study the characteristics of both deep and shallow features, and their relation to tracking accuracy and robustness. We identify the limited data and low spatial resolution as the main challenges, and propose strategies to counter these issues when integrating deep features for tracking. Furthermore, we propose a novel adaptive fusion approach that leverages the complementary properties of deep and shallow features to improve both robustness and accuracy. Extensive experiments are performed on four challenging datasets. On VOT2017, our approach significantly outperforms the top performing tracker from the challenge with a relative gain of 17% in EAO.

Joakim Johnander, Martin Danelljan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan et al.

Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF) based methods have shown competitive performance on tracking benchmarks in recent years. Generally, DCF based trackers learn a rigid appearance model of the target. However, this reliance on a single rigid appearance model is insufficient in situations where the target undergoes non-rigid transformations. In this paper, we propose a unified formulation for learning a deformable convolution filter. In our framework, the deformable filter is represented as a linear combination of sub-filters. Both the sub-filter coefficients and their relative locations are inferred jointly in our formulation. Experiments are performed on three challenging tracking benchmarks: OTB- 2015, TempleColor and VOT2016. Our approach improves the baseline method, leading to performance comparable to state-of-the-art.