RiskNet: Interaction-Aware Risk Forecasting for Autonomous Driving in Long-Tail Scenarios
This work addresses safety-critical decision-making for autonomous vehicles in uncertain and complex multi-agent environments, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck rather than a foundational advancement.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring autonomous vehicle safety in long-tail scenarios by proposing RiskNet, an interaction-aware risk forecasting framework that integrates deterministic risk modeling with probabilistic behavior prediction, and it significantly outperforms traditional methods like TTC, THW, RSS, and NC Field in accuracy, responsiveness, and directional sensitivity on datasets such as highD, inD, and rounD.
Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in long-tail scenarios remains a critical challenge, particularly under high uncertainty and complex multi-agent interactions. To address this, we propose RiskNet, an interaction-aware risk forecasting framework, which integrates deterministic risk modeling with probabilistic behavior prediction for comprehensive risk assessment. At its core, RiskNet employs a field-theoretic model that captures interactions among ego vehicle, surrounding agents, and infrastructure via interaction fields and force. This model supports multidimensional risk evaluation across diverse scenarios (highways, intersections, and roundabouts), and shows robustness under high-risk and long-tail settings. To capture the behavioral uncertainty, we incorporate a graph neural network (GNN)-based trajectory prediction module, which learns multi-modal future motion distributions. Coupled with the deterministic risk field, it enables dynamic, probabilistic risk inference across time, enabling proactive safety assessment under uncertainty. Evaluations on the highD, inD, and rounD datasets, spanning lane changes, turns, and complex merges, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional approaches (e.g., TTC, THW, RSS, NC Field) in terms of accuracy, responsiveness, and directional sensitivity, while maintaining strong generalization across scenarios. This framework supports real-time, scenario-adaptive risk forecasting and demonstrates strong generalization across uncertain driving environments. It offers a unified foundation for safety-critical decision-making in long-tail scenarios.