Vehicle Trajectory Prediction works but not everywhere

Abstract

Vehicle trajectory prediction is nowadays a fundamental pillar of self-driving cars. Both the industry and research communities have acknowledged the need for such a pillar by running public benchmarks. While state-of-the-art methods are impressive, i.e., they have no off-road prediction, their generalization to cities outside of the benchmark is unknown. In this work, we show that those methods do not generalize to new scenes. We present a novel method that automatically generates realistic scenes that cause state-of-the-art models go off-road. We frame the problem through the lens of adversarial scene generation. We promote a simple yet effective generative model based on atomic scene generation functions along with physical constraints. Our experiments show that more than 60% of the existing scenes from the current benchmarks can be modified in a way to make prediction methods fail (predicting off-road). We further show that (i) the generated scenes are realistic since they do exist in the real world, and (ii) can be used to make existing models robust by 30-40%.