Crossfusor: A Cross-Attention Transformer Enhanced Conditional Diffusion Model for Car-Following Trajectory Prediction

TL;DR

Crossfusor is a novel transformer-based diffusion model that effectively captures inter-vehicle interactions and car-following behaviors to improve the accuracy and realism of vehicle trajectory predictions for autonomous driving.

Contribution

It introduces a cross-attention transformer enhanced diffusion framework that incorporates detailed vehicle interactions and dynamics into trajectory prediction.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art models on NGSIM dataset

Achieves higher accuracy in long-term trajectory predictions

Effectively models complex inter-vehicle dependencies

Abstract

Vehicle trajectory prediction is crucial for advancing autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), enhancing road safety and traffic efficiency. While traditional methods have laid foundational work, modern deep learning techniques, particularly transformer-based models and generative approaches, have significantly improved prediction accuracy by capturing complex and non-linear patterns in vehicle motion and traffic interactions. However, these models often overlook the detailed car-following behaviors and inter-vehicle interactions essential for real-world driving scenarios. This study introduces a Cross-Attention Transformer Enhanced Conditional Diffusion Model (Crossfusor) specifically designed for car-following trajectory prediction. Crossfusor integrates detailed inter-vehicular interactions and car-following dynamics into a robust diffusion framework, improving both the accuracy and realism of predicted trajectories. The model leverages a novel temporal feature encoding framework combining GRU, location-based attention mechanisms, and Fourier embedding to capture historical vehicle dynamics. It employs noise scaled by these encoded historical features in the forward diffusion process, and uses a cross-attention transformer to model intricate inter-vehicle dependencies in the reverse denoising process. Experimental results on the NGSIM dataset demonstrate that Crossfusor outperforms state-of-the-art models, particularly in long-term predictions, showcasing its potential for enhancing the predictive capabilities of autonomous driving systems.