Evidential Uncertainty Estimation for Multi-Modal Trajectory Prediction
This addresses uncertainty quantification in trajectory prediction for autonomous driving, offering an incremental improvement with a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of uncertainty estimation in multi-modal trajectory prediction for autonomous driving by proposing an evidential deep learning approach that estimates positional and mode probability uncertainty in real time, demonstrating reliable uncertainty estimates while maintaining high accuracy on Argoverse datasets.
Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for autonomous driving, yet uncertainty in agent behavior and perception noise makes it inherently challenging. While multi-modal trajectory prediction models generate multiple plausible future paths with associated probabilities, effectively quantifying uncertainty remains an open problem. In this work, we propose a novel multi-modal trajectory prediction approach based on evidential deep learning that estimates both positional and mode probability uncertainty in real time. Our approach leverages a Normal Inverse Gamma distribution for positional uncertainty and a Dirichlet distribution for mode uncertainty. Unlike sampling-based methods, it infers both types of uncertainty in a single forward pass, significantly improving efficiency. Additionally, we experimented with uncertainty-driven importance sampling to improve training efficiency by prioritizing underrepresented high-uncertainty samples over redundant ones. We perform extensive evaluations of our method on the Argoverse 1 and Argoverse 2 datasets, demonstrating that it provides reliable uncertainty estimates while maintaining high trajectory prediction accuracy.