Variational Autoencoder-Based Vehicle Trajectory Prediction with an Interpretable Latent Space
This is an incremental improvement for autonomous driving systems, enhancing trustworthiness in predictions through interpretability.
The paper tackles vehicle trajectory prediction by introducing the Descriptive Variational Autoencoder (DVAE), which achieves similar accuracy to a conventional variational autoencoder on the highD dataset while providing an interpretable latent space for validation by expert rules.
This paper introduces the Descriptive Variational Autoencoder (DVAE), an unsupervised and end-to-end trainable neural network for predicting vehicle trajectories that provides partial interpretability. The novel approach is based on the architecture and objective of common variational autoencoders. By introducing expert knowledge within the decoder part of the autoencoder, the encoder learns to extract latent parameters that provide a graspable meaning in human terms. Such an interpretable latent space enables the validation by expert defined rule sets. The evaluation of the DVAE is performed using the publicly available highD dataset for highway traffic scenarios. In comparison to a conventional variational autoencoder with equivalent complexity, the proposed model provides a similar prediction accuracy but with the great advantage of having an interpretable latent space. For crucial decision making and assessing trustworthiness of a prediction this property is highly desirable.