LASIL: Learner-Aware Supervised Imitation Learning For Long-term Microscopic Traffic Simulation

Microscopic traffic simulation plays a crucial role in transportation engineering by providing insights into individual vehicle behavior and overall traffic flow. However, creating a realistic simulator that accurately replicates human driving behaviors in various traffic conditions presents significant challenges. Traditional simulators relying on heuristic models often fail to deliver accurate simulations due to the complexity of real-world traffic environments. Due to the covariate shift issue, existing imitation learning-based simulators often fail to generate stable long-term simulations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called learner-aware supervised imitation learning to address the covariate shift problem in multi-agent imitation learning. By leveraging a variational autoencoder simultaneously modeling the expert and learner state distribution, our approach augments expert states such that the augmented state is aware of learner state distribution. Our method, applied to urban traffic simulation, demonstrates significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art baselines in both short-term microscopic and long-term macroscopic realism when evaluated on the real-world dataset pNEUMA.

FusionAD: Multi-modality Fusion for Prediction and Planning Tasks of Autonomous Driving

Building a multi-modality multi-task neural network toward accurate and robust performance is a de-facto standard in perception task of autonomous driving. However, leveraging such data from multiple sensors to jointly optimize the prediction and planning tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present FusionAD, to the best of our knowledge, the first unified framework that fuse the information from two most critical sensors, camera and LiDAR, goes beyond perception task. Concretely, we first build a transformer based multi-modality fusion network to effectively produce fusion based features. In constrast to camera-based end-to-end method UniAD, we then establish a fusion aided modality-aware prediction and status-aware planning modules, dubbed FMSPnP that take advantages of multi-modality features. We conduct extensive experiments on commonly used benchmark nuScenes dataset, our FusionAD achieves state-of-the-art performance and surpassing baselines on average 15% on perception tasks like detection and tracking, 10% on occupancy prediction accuracy, reducing prediction error from 0.708 to 0.389 in ADE score and reduces the collision rate from 0.31% to only 0.12%.

Long-term Microscopic Traffic Simulation with History-Masked Multi-agent Imitation Learning

A realistic long-term microscopic traffic simulator is necessary for understanding how microscopic changes affect traffic patterns at a larger scale. Traditional simulators that model human driving behavior with heuristic rules often fail to achieve accurate simulations due to real-world traffic complexity. To overcome this challenge, researchers have turned to neural networks, which are trained through imitation learning from human driver demonstrations. However, existing learning-based microscopic simulators often fail to generate stable long-term simulations due to the \textit{covariate shift} issue. To address this, we propose a history-masked multi-agent imitation learning method that removes all vehicles' historical trajectory information and applies perturbation to their current positions during learning. We apply our approach specifically to the urban traffic simulation problem and evaluate it on the real-world large-scale pNEUMA dataset, achieving better short-term microscopic and long-term macroscopic similarity to real-world data than state-of-the-art baselines.

CCIL: Context-conditioned imitation learning for urban driving

Imitation learning holds great promise for addressing the complex task of autonomous urban driving, as experienced human drivers can navigate highly challenging scenarios with ease. While behavior cloning is a widely used imitation learning approach in autonomous driving due to its exemption from risky online interactions, it suffers from the covariate shift issue. To address this limitation, we propose a context-conditioned imitation learning approach that employs a policy to map the context state into the ego vehicle's future trajectory, rather than relying on the traditional formulation of both ego and context states to predict the ego action. Additionally, to reduce the implicit ego information in the coordinate system, we design an ego-perturbed goal-oriented coordinate system. The origin of this coordinate system is the ego vehicle's position plus a zero mean Gaussian perturbation, and the x-axis direction points towards its goal position. Our experiments on the real-world large-scale Lyft and nuPlan datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

End-to-End Trajectory Distribution Prediction Based on Occupancy Grid Maps

In this paper, we aim to forecast a future trajectory distribution of a moving agent in the real world, given the social scene images and historical trajectories. Yet, it is a challenging task because the ground-truth distribution is unknown and unobservable, while only one of its samples can be applied for supervising model learning, which is prone to bias. Most recent works focus on predicting diverse trajectories in order to cover all modes of the real distribution, but they may despise the precision and thus give too much credit to unrealistic predictions. To address the issue, we learn the distribution with symmetric cross-entropy using occupancy grid maps as an explicit and scene-compliant approximation to the ground-truth distribution, which can effectively penalize unlikely predictions. In specific, we present an inverse reinforcement learning based multi-modal trajectory distribution forecasting framework that learns to plan by an approximate value iteration network in an end-to-end manner. Besides, based on the predicted distribution, we generate a small set of representative trajectories through a differentiable Transformer-based network, whose attention mechanism helps to model the relations of trajectories. In experiments, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford Drone Dataset and Intersection Drone Dataset.