Realistic Adversarial Attacks for Robustness Evaluation of Trajectory Prediction Models via Future State Perturbation

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for adversarially attacking trajectory prediction models by perturbing both past and future states, revealing vulnerabilities and improving robustness evaluation for autonomous vehicle safety.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach that considers future state perturbations with dynamic constraints, providing more realistic and effective adversarial attacks for trajectory prediction models.

Findings

Increased prediction errors under adversarial attacks

Higher collision rates in adversarial scenarios

Uncovered critical weaknesses in state-of-the-art models

Abstract

Trajectory prediction is a key element of autonomous vehicle systems, enabling them to anticipate and react to the movements of other road users. Evaluating the robustness of prediction models against adversarial attacks is essential to ensure their reliability in real-world traffic. However, current approaches tend to focus on perturbing the past positions of surrounding agents, which can generate unrealistic scenarios and overlook critical vulnerabilities. This limitation may result in overly optimistic assessments of model performance in real-world conditions. In this work, we demonstrate that perturbing not just past but also future states of adversarial agents can uncover previously undetected weaknesses and thereby provide a more rigorous evaluation of model robustness. Our novel approach incorporates dynamic constraints and preserves tactical behaviors, enabling more effective and realistic adversarial attacks. We introduce new performance measures to assess the realism and impact of these adversarial trajectories. Testing our method on a state-of-the-art prediction model revealed significant increases in prediction errors and collision rates under adversarial conditions. Qualitative analysis further showed that our attacks can expose critical weaknesses, such as the inability of the model to detect potential collisions in what appear to be safe predictions. These results underscore the need for more comprehensive adversarial testing to better evaluate and improve the reliability of trajectory prediction models for autonomous vehicles.