Wolfgang Hübner

Ronny Hug, Stefan Becker, Wolfgang Hübner et al.

Probabilistic models for sequential data are the basis for a variety of applications concerned with processing timely ordered information. The predominant approach in this domain is given by recurrent neural networks, implementing either an approximate Bayesian approach (e.g. Variational Autoencoders or Generative Adversarial Networks) or a regression-based approach, i.e. variations of Mixture Density networks (MDN). In this paper, we focus on the $\mathcal{N}$-MDN variant, which parameterizes (mixtures of) probabilistic Bézier curves ($\mathcal{N}$-Curves) for modeling stochastic processes. While in favor in terms of computational cost and stability, MDNs generally fall behind approximate Bayesian approaches in terms of expressiveness. Towards this end, we present an approach for closing this gap by enabling full Bayesian inference on top of $\mathcal{N}$-MDNs. For this, we show that $\mathcal{N}$-Curves are a special case of Gaussian processes (denoted as $\mathcal{N}$-GP) and then derive corresponding mean and kernel functions for different modalities. Following this, we propose the use of the $\mathcal{N}$-MDN as a data-dependent generator for $\mathcal{N}$-GP prior distributions. We show the advantages granted by this combined model in an application context, using human trajectory prediction as an example.

Stefan Becker, Jens Bayer, Ronny Hug et al.

Data pooling offers various advantages, such as increasing the sample size, improving generalization, reducing sampling bias, and addressing data sparsity and quality, but it is not straightforward and may even be counterproductive. Assessing the effectiveness of pooling datasets in a principled manner is challenging due to the difficulty in estimating the overall information content of individual datasets. Towards this end, we propose incorporating a data source prediction module into standard object detection pipelines. The module runs with minimal overhead during inference time, providing additional information about the data source assigned to individual detections. We show the benefits of the so-called dataset affinity score by automatically selecting samples from a heterogeneous pool of vehicle datasets. The results show that object detectors can be trained on a significantly sparser set of training samples without losing detection accuracy.

Ronny Hug, Stefan Becker, Wolfgang Hübner et al.

Methods to quantify the complexity of trajectory datasets are still a missing piece in benchmarking human trajectory prediction models. In order to gain a better understanding of the complexity of trajectory prediction tasks and following the intuition, that more complex datasets contain more information, an approach for quantifying the amount of information contained in a dataset from a prototype-based dataset representation is proposed. The dataset representation is obtained by first employing a non-trivial spatial sequence alignment, which enables a subsequent learning vector quantization (LVQ) stage. A large-scale complexity analysis is conducted on several human trajectory prediction benchmarking datasets, followed by a brief discussion on indications for human trajectory prediction and benchmarking.