FollowGen: A Scaled Noise Conditional Diffusion Model for Car-Following Trajectory Prediction
This work addresses trajectory prediction for autonomous driving systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing generative models with specific enhancements for car-following behaviors.
The study tackled the problem of predicting car-following trajectories in autonomous driving by introducing a scaled noise conditional diffusion model that integrates detailed inter-vehicular interactions and dynamics, achieving state-of-the-art performance and robustness in experiments on real-world driving scenarios.
Vehicle trajectory prediction is crucial for advancing autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Although deep learning-based approaches - especially those utilizing transformer-based and generative models - have markedly improved prediction accuracy by capturing complex, non-linear patterns in vehicle dynamics and traffic interactions, they frequently overlook detailed car-following behaviors and the inter-vehicle interactions critical for real-world driving applications, particularly in fully autonomous or mixed traffic scenarios. To address the issue, this study introduces a scaled noise conditional diffusion model for car-following trajectory prediction, which integrates detailed inter-vehicular interactions and car-following dynamics into a generative framework, improving both the accuracy and plausibility of predicted trajectories. The model utilizes a novel pipeline to capture historical vehicle dynamics by scaling noise with encoded historical features within the diffusion process. Particularly, it employs a cross-attention-based transformer architecture to model intricate inter-vehicle dependencies, effectively guiding the denoising process and enhancing prediction accuracy. Experimental results on diverse real-world driving scenarios demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and robustness of the proposed method.