Vehicle Trajectory Prediction Works, but Not Everywhere

Mohammadhossein Bahari, Saeed Saadatnejad, Ahmad Rahimi, Mohammad Shaverdikondori, Amir Hossein Shahidzadeh, Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli, Alexandre Alahi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 17123-17133

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 providing 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 remains unexplored. In this work, we show that those methods do not generalize to new scenes. We present a novel method that automatically generates realistic scenes causing state-of-the-art models to go off-road. We frame the problem through the lens of adversarial scene generation. The method is a simple yet effective generative model based on atomic scene generation functions along with physical constraints. Our experiments show that more than 60% of existing scenes from the current benchmarks can be modified in a way to make prediction methods fail (i.e., predicting off-road). We further show that the generated scenes (i) are realistic since they do exist in the real world, and (ii) can be used to make existing models more robust, yielding 30-40% reductions in the off-road rate. The code is available online: https://s-attack.github.io/