Applying adversarial networks to increase the data efficiency and reliability of Self-Driving Cars

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adversarial training framework using GANs to generate realistic perturbations, enhancing CNN robustness and data efficiency for self-driving cars, leading to improved accuracy and safety in simulations and real-world tests.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel adversarial self-driving framework that reduces data requirements and increases CNN robustness against perturbations in autonomous driving.

Findings

18% increase in classification accuracy with the framework

No collisions in 30 minutes of simulated driving

Effective identification of CNN vulnerabilities to perturbations

Abstract

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are vulnerable to misclassifying images when small perturbations are present. With the increasing prevalence of CNNs in self-driving cars, it is vital to ensure these algorithms are robust to prevent collisions from occurring due to failure in recognizing a situation. In the Adversarial Self-Driving framework, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is implemented to generate realistic perturbations in an image that cause a classifier CNN to misclassify data. This perturbed data is then used to train the classifier CNN further. The Adversarial Self-driving framework is applied to an image classification algorithm to improve the classification accuracy on perturbed images and is later applied to train a self-driving car to drive in a simulation. A small-scale self-driving car is also built to drive around a track and classify signs. The Adversarial Self-driving framework produces perturbed images through learning a dataset, as a result removing the need to train on significant amounts of data. Experiments demonstrate that the Adversarial Self-driving framework identifies situations where CNNs are vulnerable to perturbations and generates new examples of these situations for the CNN to train on. The additional data generated by the Adversarial Self-driving framework provides sufficient data for the CNN to generalize to the environment. Therefore, it is a viable tool to increase the resilience of CNNs to perturbations. Particularly, in the real-world self-driving car, the application of the Adversarial Self-Driving framework resulted in an 18 % increase in accuracy, and the simulated self-driving model had no collisions in 30 minutes of driving.