Robustness of Trajectory Prediction Models Under Map-Based Attacks

Zhihao Zheng, Xiaowen Ying, Zhen Yao, Mooi Choo Chuah; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 4541-4550

Trajectory Prediction (TP) is a critical component in the control system of an Autonomous Vehicle (AV). It predicts future motion of traffic agents based on observations of their past trajectories. Existing works have studied the vulnerability of TP models when the perception systems are under attacks and proposed corresponding mitigation schemes. Recent TP designs have incorporated context map information for performance enhancements. Such designs are subjected to a new type of attacks where an attacker can interfere with these TP models by attacking the context maps. In this paper, we study the robustness of TP models under our newly proposed map-based adversarial attacks. We show that such attacks can compromise state-of-the-art TP models that use either image-based or node-based map representation while keeping the adversarial examples imperceptible. We also demonstrate that our attacks can still be launched under the black-box settings without any knowledge of the TP models running underneath. Our experiments on the NuScene dataset show that the proposed map-based attacks can increase the trajectory prediction errors by 29-110%. Finally, we demonstrate that two defense mechanisms are effective in defending against such map-based attacks.