Reinforcement Learning for Predicting Traffic Accidents
This work addresses safety in autonomous driving, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing RL method to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of early accident prediction in autonomous driving by applying the DARC reinforcement learning method to dashcam videos, achieving predictions 5% earlier on average with improved precision metrics.
As the demand for autonomous driving increases, it is paramount to ensure safety. Early accident prediction using deep learning methods for driving safety has recently gained much attention. In this task, early accident prediction and a point prediction of where the drivers should look are determined, with the dashcam video as input. We propose to exploit the double actors and regularized critics (DARC) method, for the first time, on this accident forecasting platform. We derive inspiration from DARC since it is currently a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) model on continuous action space suitable for accident anticipation. Results show that by utilizing DARC, we can make predictions 5\% earlier on average while improving in multiple metrics of precision compared to existing methods. The results imply that using our RL-based problem formulation could significantly increase the safety of autonomous driving.