An End-to-End Decision-Aware Multi-Scale Attention-Based Model for Explainable Autonomous Driving
For researchers and practitioners in autonomous driving, this work addresses the need for explainable AI in safety-critical systems, though the improvements are incremental.
The paper proposes a multi-scale attention-based model for explainable autonomous driving that integrates driving decisions into the reasoning component to provide case-specific explanations. The model achieves superior performance over classic and state-of-the-art models on BDD-OIA and nu-AR datasets, evaluated using F1-score and a new Joint F1 metric.
The application of computer vision is gradually increasing across various domains. They employ deep learning models with a black-box nature. Without the ability to explain the behavior of neural networks, especially their decision-making processes, it is not possible to recognize their efficiency, predict system failures, or effectively implement them in real-world applications. Due to the inevitable use of deep learning in fully automated driving systems, many methods have been proposed to explain their behavior; however, they suffer from flawed reasoning and unreliable metrics, which have prevented a comprehensive understanding of complex models in autonomous vehicles and hindered the development of truly reliable systems. In this study, we propose a multi-scale attention-based model in which driving decisions are fed into the reasoning component to provide case-specific explanations for each decision simultaneously. For quantitative evaluation of our model's performance, we employ the F1-score metric, and also proposed a new metric called the Joint F1 score to demonstrate the accurate and reliable performance of the model in terms of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In addition to the BDD-OIA dataset, the nu-AR dataset is utilized to further validate the generalization capability and robustness of the proposed network. The results demonstrate the superiority of our reasoning network over the classic and state-of-the-art models.