Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction: A Unified Framework Harnessing Positional and Semantic UncertaintiesJintao Sun, Hu Zhang, Gangyi Ding et al.
Trajectory prediction seeks to forecast the future motion of dynamic entities, such as vehicles and pedestrians, given a temporal horizon of historical movement data and environmental context. A central challenge in this domain is the inherent uncertainty in real-time maps, arising from two primary sources: (1) positional inaccuracies due to sensor limitations or environmental occlusions, and (2) semantic errors stemming from misinterpretations of scene context. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified framework that jointly models positional and semantic uncertainties and explicitly integrates them into the trajectory prediction pipeline. Our approach employs a dual-head architecture to independently estimate semantic and positional predictions in a dual-pass manner, deriving prediction variances as uncertainty indicators in an end-to-end fashion. These uncertainties are subsequently fused with the semantic and positional predictions to enhance the robustness of trajectory forecasts. We evaluate our uncertainty-aware framework on the nuScenes real-world driving dataset, conducting extensive experiments across four map estimation methods and two trajectory prediction baselines. Results verify that our method (1) effectively quantifies map uncertainties through both positional and semantic dimensions, and (2) consistently improves the performance of existing trajectory prediction models across multiple metrics, including minimum Average Displacement Error (minADE), minimum Final Displacement Error (minFDE), and Miss Rate (MR). Code will available at https://github.com/JT-Sun/UATP.
3.6CVMay 25, 2025
Echo Planning for Autonomous Driving: From Current Observations to Future Trajectories and BackJintao Sun, Hu Zhang, Gangyi Ding et al.
Modern end-to-end autonomous driving systems suffer from a critical limitation: their planners lack mechanisms to enforce temporal consistency between predicted trajectories and evolving scene dynamics. This absence of self-supervision allows early prediction errors to compound catastrophically over time. We introduce Echo Planning, a novel self-correcting framework that establishes a closed-loop Current - Future - Current (CFC) cycle to harmonize trajectory prediction with scene coherence. Our key insight is that plausible future trajectories must be bi-directionally consistent, ie, not only generated from current observations but also capable of reconstructing them. The CFC mechanism first predicts future trajectories from the Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) scene representation, then inversely maps these trajectories back to estimate the current BEV state. By enforcing consistency between the original and reconstructed BEV representations through a cycle loss, the framework intrinsically penalizes physically implausible or misaligned trajectories. Experiments on nuScenes demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, reducing L2 error by 0.04 m and collision rate by 0.12% compared to one-shot planners. Crucially, our method requires no additional supervision, leveraging the CFC cycle as an inductive bias for robust planning. This work offers a deployable solution for safety-critical autonomous systems.