Learning A Unified Risk Map for Autonomous Driving in Partially Observable Environments
Abstract
A unified risk map modeling framework addresses occlusion challenges in autonomous driving by integrating traffic flow and collision risks through spatiotemporal modeling and diffusion-based scenario generation.
Occlusion-aware prediction remains a critical challenge in autonomous driving due to the inherent uncertainty of unobserved regions. Existing approaches either overestimate risk based on reachable states or struggle to predict accurate trajectories under high occlusion uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose a unified risk map modeling and learning framework for partially observable environments. Our method integrates traffic flow risk and collision risk through spatiotemporal modeling, enabling fine-grained assessment of occlusion-induced hazards. To address the scarcity of scenarios involving occluded interactions, we introduce a diffusion-based scenario generation framework that produces realistic yet adversarial scenarios. We integrate the modeling and learning of a unified risk map into a framework that supports risk-aware planning under partial observability. Experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art occlusion-aware baseline, improving minimum time-to-collision by 0.78 times and average time-to-collision by 1.67 times. The proposed framework offers a comprehensive and practical solution for risk-aware planning in partially observable environments.
Community
Learning A Unified Risk Map for Autonomous Driving in Partially Observable Environments (IEEE RA-L) — How should a self-driving car reason about danger it can't see? This work (IEEE RA-L) introduces a unified spatiotemporal risk map that fuses traffic-flow risk and collision risk into a single field for occlusion-aware planning. Its standout idea: generate rich risk labels offline by combining an expressive guided-diffusion model with rule-based logic, then distill them into a lightweight transformer that predicts the field in real time from vectorized maps and the ego's field-of-view — the richness of a generative model at feed-forward speed. To beat the scarcity of safety-critical occluded data, a guidance-based diffusion generator synthesizes adversarial-yet-realistic interactions. On the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, it delivers consistent safety gains (e.g., TTC) over SOTA occlusion-aware baselines — a practical "use a heavy model to teach a fast one" template for safety-critical robotics.
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