Development and testing of an image transformer for explainable autonomous driving systems
This addresses the problem of user distrust in autonomous driving systems, though it is incremental as it applies an existing Transformer method to this domain.
The paper tackled the lack of interpretability in deep learning models for autonomous driving by proposing an explainable end-to-end system based on a Transformer, which achieved superior performance in predicting actions and explanations with lower computational cost compared to a benchmark model.
In the last decade, deep learning (DL) approaches have been used successfully in computer vision (CV) applications. However, DL-based CV models are generally considered to be black boxes due to their lack of interpretability. This black box behavior has exacerbated user distrust and therefore has prevented widespread deployment DLCV models in autonomous driving tasks even though some of these models exhibit superiority over human performance. For this reason, it is essential to develop explainable DL models for autonomous driving task. Explainable DL models can not only boost user trust in autonomy but also serve as a diagnostic approach to identify anydefects and weaknesses of the model during the system development phase. In this paper, we propose an explainable end-to-end autonomous driving system based on "Transformer", a state-of-the-art (SOTA) self-attention based model, to map visual features from images collected by onboard cameras to guide potential driving actions with corresponding explanations. The model achieves a soft attention over the global features of the image. The results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model as it exhibits superior performance (in terms of correct prediction of actions and explanations) compared to the benchmark model by a significant margin with lower computational cost.