Hong Wang

Yanchao Xu, Wenbo Shao, Jun Li et al.

Intersection is one of the most challenging scenarios for autonomous driving tasks. Due to the complexity and stochasticity, essential applications (e.g., behavior modeling, motion prediction, safety validation, etc.) at intersections rely heavily on data-driven techniques. Thus, there is an intense demand for trajectory datasets of traffic participants (TPs) in intersections. Currently, most intersections in urban areas are equipped with traffic lights. However, there is not yet a large-scale, high-quality, publicly available trajectory dataset for signalized intersections. Therefore, in this paper, a typical two-phase signalized intersection is selected in Tianjin, China. Besides, a pipeline is designed to construct a Signalized INtersection Dataset (SIND), which contains 7 hours of recording including over 13,000 TPs with 7 types. Then, the behaviors of traffic light violations in SIND are recorded. Furthermore, the SIND is also compared with other similar works. The features of the SIND can be summarized as follows: 1) SIND provides more comprehensive information, including traffic light states, motion parameters, High Definition (HD) map, etc. 2) The category of TPs is diverse and characteristic, where the proportion of vulnerable road users (VRUs) is up to 62.6% 3) Multiple traffic light violations of non-motor vehicles are shown. We believe that SIND would be an effective supplement to existing datasets and can promote related research on autonomous driving.The dataset is available online via: https://github.com/SOTIF-AVLab/SinD

Wenbo Shao, Yanchao Xu, Liang Peng et al.

Motion prediction is essential for safe and efficient autonomous driving. However, the inexplicability and uncertainty of complex artificial intelligence models may lead to unpredictable failures of the motion prediction module, which may mislead the system to make unsafe decisions. Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods to guarantee reliable autonomous driving, where failure detection is a potential direction. Uncertainty estimates can be used to quantify the degree of confidence a model has in its predictions and may be valuable for failure detection. We propose a framework of failure detection for motion prediction from the uncertainty perspective, considering both motion uncertainty and model uncertainty, and formulate various uncertainty scores according to different prediction stages. The proposed approach is evaluated based on different motion prediction algorithms, uncertainty estimation methods, uncertainty scores, etc., and the results show that uncertainty is promising for failure detection for motion prediction but should be used with caution.

Yining Ma, Wei Jiang, Lingtong Zhang et al.

Interaction between the background vehicles (BVs) and automated vehicles (AVs) in scenario-based testing plays a critical role in evaluating the intelligence of the AVs. Current testing scenarios typically employ predefined or scripted BVs, which inadequately reflect the complexity of human-like social behaviors in real-world driving scenarios, and also lack a systematic metric for evaluating the comprehensive intelligence of AVs. Therefore, this paper proposes an evolving scenario generation method that utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to create human-like BVs for testing and intelligence evaluation of AVs. Firstly, a class of driver models with human-like competitive, cooperative, and mutual driving motivations is designed. Then, utilizing an improved "level-k" training procedure, the three distinct driver models acquire game-based interactive driving policies. And these models are assigned to BVs for generating evolving scenarios in which all BVs can interact continuously and evolve diverse contents. Next, a framework including safety, driving efficiency, and interaction utility are presented to evaluate and quantify the intelligence performance of 3 systems under test (SUTs), indicating the effectiveness of the evolving scenario for intelligence testing. Finally, the complexity and fidelity of the proposed evolving testing scenario are validated. The results demonstrate that the proposed evolving scenario exhibits the highest level of complexity compared to other baseline scenarios and has more than 85% similarity to naturalistic driving data. This highlights the potential of the proposed method to facilitate the development and evaluation of high-level AVs in a realistic and challenging environment.

Liang Peng, Boqi Li, Wenhao Yu et al.

Autonomous driving confronts great challenges in complex traffic scenarios, where the risk of Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) can be triggered by the dynamic operational environment and system insufficiencies. The SOTIF risk is reflected not only intuitively in the collision risk with objects outside the autonomous vehicles (AVs), but also inherently in the performance limitation risk of the implemented algorithms themselves. How to minimize the SOTIF risk for autonomous driving is currently a critical, difficult, and unresolved issue. Therefore, this paper proposes the "Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System" as a systematic approach to online minimize the SOTIF risk, which aims to provide a systematic solution for monitoring, quantification, and mitigation of inherent and external risks. The core of this system is the risk monitoring of the implemented artificial intelligence algorithms within the AV. As a demonstration of the Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System, the risk monitoring of the perception algorithm, i.e., YOLOv5 is highlighted. Moreover, the inherent perception algorithm risk and external collision risk are jointly quantified via SOTIF entropy, which is then propagated downstream to the decision-making module and mitigated. Finally, several challenging scenarios are demonstrated, and the Hardware-in-the-Loop experiments are conducted to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the system. The results demonstrate that the Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System enables dependable online monitoring, quantification, and mitigation of SOTIF risk in real-time critical traffic environments.

Wenbo Shao, Jun Li, Hong Wang

Trajectory prediction is one of the key components of the autonomous driving software stack. Accurate prediction for the future movement of surrounding traffic participants is an important prerequisite for ensuring the driving efficiency and safety of intelligent vehicles. Trajectory prediction algorithms based on artificial intelligence have been widely studied and applied in recent years and have achieved remarkable results. However, complex artificial intelligence models are uncertain and difficult to explain, so they may face unintended failures when applied in the real world. In this paper, a self-aware trajectory prediction method is proposed. By introducing a self-awareness module and a two-stage training process, the original trajectory prediction module's performance is estimated online, to facilitate the system to deal with the possible scenario of insufficient prediction function in time, and create conditions for the realization of safe and reliable autonomous driving. Comprehensive experiments and analysis are performed, and the proposed method performed well in terms of self-awareness, memory footprint, and real-time performance, showing that it may serve as a promising paradigm for safe autonomous driving.

Teng Liu, Xingyu Mu, Xiaolin Tang et al.

This work optimizes the highway decision making strategy of autonomous vehicles by using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, the highway driving environment is built, wherein the ego vehicle, surrounding vehicles, and road lanes are included. Then, the overtaking decision-making problem of the automated vehicle is formulated as an optimal control problem. Then relevant control actions, state variables, and optimization objectives are elaborated. Finally, the deep Q-network is applied to derive the intelligent driving policies for the ego vehicle. Simulation results reveal that the ego vehicle could safely and efficiently accomplish the driving task after learning and training.

Qiulei Dong, Zhanyi Hu

Cadieu et al. (Cadieu,2014) reported that deep neural networks(DNNs) could rival the representation of primate inferotemporal cortex for object recognition. Lehky et al. (Lehky,2011) provided a statistical analysis on neural responses to object stimuli in primate AIT cortex. They found the intrinsic dimensionality of object representations in AIT cortex is around 100 (Lehky,2014). Considering the outstanding performance of DNNs in object recognition, it is worthwhile investigating whether the responses of DNN neurons have similar response statistics to those of AIT neurons. Following Lehky et al.'s works, we analyze the response statistics to image stimuli and the intrinsic dimensionality of object representations of DNN neurons. Our findings show in terms of kurtosis and Pareto tail index, the response statistics on single-neuron selectivity and population sparseness of DNN neurons are fundamentally different from those of IT neurons except some special cases. By increasing the number of neurons and stimuli, the conclusions could alter substantially. In addition, with the ascendancy of the convolutional layers of DNNs, the single-neuron selectivity and population sparseness of DNN neurons increase, indicating the last convolutional layer is to learn features for object representations, while the following fully-connected layers are to learn categorization features. It is also found that a sufficiently large number of stimuli and neurons are necessary for obtaining a stable dimensionality. To our knowledge, this is the first work to analyze the response statistics of DNN neurons comparing with AIT neurons, and our results provide not only some insights into the discrepancy of DNN neurons with respect to IT neurons in object representation, but also shed some light on possible outcomes of IT neurons when the number of recorded neurons and stimuli is beyond the level in (Lehky,2011,2014).