ITPNet: Towards Instantaneous Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Trajectory prediction of agents is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles, whereas previous approaches usually rely on sufficiently long-observed trajectory to predict the future trajectory of the agents. However, in real-world scenarios, it is not realistic to collect adequate observed locations for moving agents, leading to the collapse of most prediction models. For instance, when a moving car suddenly appears and is very close to an autonomous vehicle because of the obstruction, it is quite necessary for the autonomous vehicle to quickly and accurately predict the future trajectories of the car with limited observed trajectory locations. In light of this, we focus on investigating the task of instantaneous trajectory prediction, i.e., two observed locations are available during inference. To this end, we propose a general and plug-and-play instantaneous trajectory prediction approach, called ITPNet. Specifically, we propose a backward forecasting mechanism to reversely predict the latent feature representations of unobserved historical trajectories of the agent based on its two observed locations and then leverage them as complementary information for future trajectory prediction. Meanwhile, due to the inevitable existence of noise and redundancy in the predicted latent feature representations, we further devise a Noise Redundancy Reduction Former, aiming at to filter out noise and redundancy from unobserved trajectories and integrate the filtered features and observed features into a compact query for future trajectory predictions. In essence, ITPNet can be naturally compatible with existing trajectory prediction models, enabling them to gracefully handle the case of instantaneous trajectory prediction. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse and nuScenes datasets demonstrate ITPNet outperforms the baselines, and its efficacy with different trajectory prediction models.

Hallucination Detection in LLMs: Fast and Memory-Efficient Finetuned Models

Uncertainty estimation is a necessary component when implementing AI in high-risk settings, such as autonomous cars, medicine, or insurances. Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen a surge in popularity in recent years, but they are subject to hallucinations, which may cause serious harm in high-risk settings. Despite their success, LLMs are expensive to train and run: they need a large amount of computations and memory, preventing the use of ensembling methods in practice. In this work, we present a novel method that allows for fast and memory-friendly training of LLM ensembles. We show that the resulting ensembles can detect hallucinations and are a viable approach in practice as only one GPU is needed for training and inference.

Knowledge Distillation Neural Network for Predicting Car-following Behaviour of Human-driven and Autonomous Vehicles

As we move towards a mixed-traffic scenario of Autonomous vehicles (AVs) and Human-driven vehicles (HDVs), understanding the car-following behaviour is important to improve traffic efficiency and road safety. Using a real-world trajectory dataset, this study uses descriptive and statistical analysis to investigate the car-following behaviours of three vehicle pairs: HDV-AV, AV-HDV and HDV-HDV in mixed traffic. The ANOVA test showed that car-following behaviours across different vehicle pairs are statistically significant (p-value < 0.05). We also introduce a data-driven Knowledge Distillation Neural Network (KDNN) model for predicting car-following behaviour in terms of speed. The KDNN model demonstrates comparable predictive accuracy to its teacher network, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and outperforms both the standalone student network, a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and traditional physics-based models like the Gipps model. Notably, the KDNN model better prevents collisions, measured by minimum Time-to-Collision (TTC), and operates with lower computational power, making it ideal for AVs or driving simulators requiring efficient computing.

FollowGen: A Scaled Noise Conditional Diffusion Model for Car-Following Trajectory Prediction

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.

Scalable Supervisory Architecture for Autonomous Race Cars

In recent years, the number and importance of autonomous racing leagues, and consequently the number of studies on them, has been growing. The seamless integration between different series has gained attention due to the scene's diversity. However, the high cost of full scale racing makes it a more accessible development model, to research at smaller form factors and scale up the achieved results. This paper presents a scalable architecture designed for autonomous racing that emphasizes modularity, adaptability to diverse configurations, and the ability to supervise parallel execution of pipelines that allows the use of different dynamic strategies. The system showcased consistent racing performance across different environments, demonstrated through successful participation in two relevant competitions. The results confirm the architecture's scalability and versatility, providing a robust foundation for the development of competitive autonomous racing systems. The successful application in real-world scenarios validates its practical effectiveness and highlights its potential for future advancements in autonomous racing technology.

OpenLKA: an open dataset of lane keeping assist from market autonomous vehicles

The Lane Keeping Assist (LKA) system has become a standard feature in recent car models. While marketed as providing auto-steering capabilities, the system's operational characteristics and safety performance remain underexplored, primarily due to a lack of real-world testing and comprehensive data. To fill this gap, we extensively tested mainstream LKA systems from leading U.S. automakers in Tampa, Florida. Using an innovative method, we collected a comprehensive dataset that includes full Controller Area Network (CAN) messages with LKA attributes, as well as video, perception, and lateral trajectory data from a high-quality front-facing camera equipped with advanced vision detection and trajectory planning algorithms. Our tests spanned diverse, challenging conditions, including complex road geometry, adverse weather, degraded lane markings, and their combinations. A vision language model (VLM) further annotated the videos to capture weather, lighting, and traffic features. Based on this dataset, we present an empirical overview of LKA's operational features and safety performance. Key findings indicate: (i) LKA is vulnerable to faint markings and low pavement contrast; (ii) it struggles in lane transitions (merges, diverges, intersections), often causing unintended departures or disengagements; (iii) steering torque limitations lead to frequent deviations on sharp turns, posing safety risks; and (iv) LKA systems consistently maintain rigid lane-centering, lacking adaptability on tight curves or near large vehicles such as trucks. We conclude by demonstrating how this dataset can guide both infrastructure planning and self-driving technology. In view of LKA's limitations, we recommend improvements in road geometry and pavement maintenance. Additionally, we illustrate how the dataset supports the development of human-like LKA systems via VLM fine-tuning and Chain of Thought reasoning.

Data Fusion of Semantic and Depth Information in the Context of Object Detection

Considerable study has already been conducted regarding autonomous driving in modern era. An autonomous driving system must be extremely good at detecting objects surrounding the car to ensure safety. In this paper, classification, and estimation of an object's (pedestrian) position (concerning an ego 3D coordinate system) are studied and the distance between the ego vehicle and the object in the context of autonomous driving is measured. To classify the object, faster Region-based Convolution Neural Network (R-CNN) with inception v2 is utilized. First, a network is trained with customized dataset to estimate the reference position of objects as well as the distance from the vehicle. From camera calibration to computing the distance, cutting-edge technologies of computer vision algorithms in a series of processes are applied to generate a 3D reference point of the region of interest. The foremost step in this process is generating a disparity map using the concept of stereo vision.

Evaluation of Local Planner-Based Stanley Control in Autonomous RC Car Racing Series

This paper proposes a control technique for autonomous RC car racing. The presented method does not require any map-building phase beforehand since it operates only local path planning on the actual LiDAR point cloud. Racing control algorithms must have the capability to be optimized to the actual track layout for minimization of lap time. In the examined one, it is guaranteed with the improvement of the Stanley controller with additive control components to stabilize the movement in both low and high-speed ranges, and with the integration of an adaptive lookahead point to induce sharp and dynamic cornering for traveled distance reduction. The developed method is tested on a 1/10-sized RC car, and the tuning procedure from a base solution to the optimal setting in a real F1Tenth race is presented. Furthermore, the proposed method is evaluated with a comparison to a more simple reactive method, and in parallel to a more complex optimization-based technique that involves offline map building the global optimal trajectory calculation. The performance of the proposed method compared to the latter, referring to the lap time, is that the proposed one has only 8% lower average speed. This demonstrates that with appropriate tuning, a local planning-based method can be comparable with a more complex optimization-based one. Thus, the performance gap is lower than 10% from the state-of-the-art method. Moreover, the proposed technique has significantly higher similarity to real scenarios, therefore the results can be interesting in the context of automotive industry.

Explore the Use of Time Series Foundation Model for Car-Following Behavior Analysis

Modeling car-following behavior is essential for traffic simulation, analyzing driving patterns, and understanding complex traffic flows with varying levels of autonomous vehicles. Traditional models like the Safe Distance Model and Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) require precise parameter calibration and often lack generality due to simplified assumptions about driver behavior. While machine learning and deep learning methods capture complex patterns, they require large labeled datasets. Foundation models provide a more efficient alternative. Pre-trained on vast, diverse time series datasets, they can be applied directly to various tasks without the need for extensive re-training. These models generalize well across domains, and with minimal fine-tuning, they can be adapted to specific tasks like car-following behavior prediction. In this paper, we apply Chronos, a state-of-the-art public time series foundation model, to analyze car-following behavior using the Open ACC dataset. Without fine-tuning, Chronos outperforms traditional models like IDM and Exponential smoothing with trend and seasonality (ETS), and achieves similar results to deep learning models such as DeepAR and TFT, with an RMSE of 0.60. After fine-tuning, Chronos reduces the error to an RMSE of 0.53, representing a 33.75% improvement over IDM and a 12-37% reduction compared to machine learning models like ETS and deep learning models including DeepAR, WaveNet, and TFT. This demonstrates the potential of foundation models to significantly advance transportation research, offering a scalable, adaptable, and highly accurate approach to predicting and simulating car-following behaviors.

Robots that Learn to Safely Influence via Prediction-Informed Reach-Avoid Dynamic Games

Robots can influence people to accomplish their tasks more efficiently: autonomous cars can inch forward at an intersection to pass through, and tabletop manipulators can go for an object on the table first. However, a robot's ability to influence can also compromise the safety of nearby people if naively executed. In this work, we pose and solve a novel robust reach-avoid dynamic game which enables robots to be maximally influential, but only when a safety backup control exists. On the human side, we model the human's behavior as goal-driven but conditioned on the robot's plan, enabling us to capture influence. On the robot side, we solve the dynamic game in the joint physical and belief space, enabling the robot to reason about how its uncertainty in human behavior will evolve over time. We instantiate our method, called SLIDE (Safely Leveraging Influence in Dynamic Environments), in a high-dimensional (39-D) simulated human-robot collaborative manipulation task solved via offline game-theoretic reinforcement learning. We compare our approach to a robust baseline that treats the human as a worst-case adversary, a safety controller that does not explicitly reason about influence, and an energy-function-based safety shield. We find that SLIDE consistently enables the robot to leverage the influence it has on the human when it is safe to do so, ultimately allowing the robot to be less conservative while still ensuring a high safety rate during task execution.