arXiv subjects

Lars Kunze

Publications and source records attributed to Lars Kunze.

49 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Effects of Explanation Specificity on Passengers in Autonomous Driving

The nature of explanations provided by an explainable AI algorithm has been a topic of interest in the explainable AI and human-computer interaction community. In this paper, we investigate the effects of natural language explanations' specificity on passengers in autonomous driving. We extended an existing data-driven tree-based explainer algorithm by adding a rule-based option for explanation generation. We generated auditory natural language explanations with different levels of specificity (abstract and specific) and tested these explanations in a within-subject user study (N=39) using an immersive physical driving simulation setup. Our results showed that both abstract and specific explanations had similar positive effects on passengers' perceived safety and the feeling of anxiety. However, the specific explanations influenced the desire of passengers to takeover driving control from the autonomous vehicle (AV), while the abstract explanations did not. We conclude that natural language auditory explanations are useful for passengers in autonomous driving, and their specificity levels could influence how much in-vehicle participants would wish to be in control of the driving activity.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Textual Explanations for Automated Commentary Driving

The provision of natural language explanations for the predictions of deep-learning-based vehicle controllers is critical as it enhances transparency and easy audit. In this work, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) prediction and explanation model is thoroughly evaluated and validated (as a benchmark) on the new Sense--Assess--eXplain (SAX). Additionally, we developed a new explainer model that improved over the baseline architecture in two ways: (i) an integration of part of speech prediction and (ii) an introduction of special token penalties. On the BLEU metric, our explanation generation technique outperformed SOTA by a factor of 7.7 when applied on the BDD-X dataset. The description generation technique is also improved by a factor of 1.3. Hence, our work contributes to the realisation of future explainable autonomous vehicles.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Evaluating Temporal Observation-Based Causal Discovery Techniques Applied to Road Driver Behaviour

Autonomous robots are required to reason about the behaviour of dynamic agents in their environment. The creation of models to describe these relationships is typically accomplished through the application of causal discovery techniques. However, as it stands observational causal discovery techniques struggle to adequately cope with conditions such as causal sparsity and non-stationarity typically seen during online usage in autonomous agent domains. Meanwhile, interventional techniques are not always feasible due to domain restrictions. In order to better explore the issues facing observational techniques and promote further discussion of these topics we carry out a benchmark across 10 contemporary observational temporal causal discovery methods in the domain of autonomous driving. By evaluating these methods upon causal scenes drawn from real world datasets in addition to those generated synthetically we highlight where improvements need to be made in order to facilitate the application of causal discovery techniques to the aforementioned use-cases. Finally, we discuss potential directions for future work that could help better tackle the difficulties currently experienced by state of the art techniques.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Explainable Action Prediction through Self-Supervision on Scene Graphs

This work explores scene graphs as a distilled representation of high-level information for autonomous driving, applied to future driver-action prediction. Given the scarcity and strong imbalance of data samples, we propose a self-supervision pipeline to infer representative and well-separated embeddings. Key aspects are interpretability and explainability; as such, we embed in our architecture attention mechanisms that can create spatial and temporal heatmaps on the scene graphs. We evaluate our system on the ROAD dataset against a fully-supervised approach, showing the superiority of our training regime.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

From Spoken Thoughts to Automated Driving Commentary: Predicting and Explaining Intelligent Vehicles' Actions

In commentary driving, drivers verbalise their observations, assessments and intentions. By speaking out their thoughts, both learning and expert drivers are able to create a better understanding and awareness of their surroundings. In the intelligent vehicle context, automated driving commentary can provide intelligible explanations about driving actions, thereby assisting a driver or an end-user during driving operations in challenging and safety-critical scenarios. In this paper, we conducted a field study in which we deployed a research vehicle in an urban environment to obtain data. While collecting sensor data of the vehicle's surroundings, we obtained driving commentary from a driving instructor using the think-aloud protocol. We analysed the driving commentary and uncovered an explanation style; the driver first announces his observations, announces his plans, and then makes general remarks. He also makes counterfactual comments. We successfully demonstrated how factual and counterfactual natural language explanations that follow this style could be automatically generated using a transparent tree-based approach. Generated explanations for longitudinal actions (e.g., stop and move) were deemed more intelligible and plausible by human judges compared to lateral actions, such as lane changes. We discussed how our approach can be built on in the future to realise more robust and effective explainability for driver assistance as well as partial and conditional automation of driving functions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Explanations in Autonomous Driving: A Survey

The automotive industry has witnessed an increasing level of development in the past decades; from manufacturing manually operated vehicles to manufacturing vehicles with a high level of automation. With the recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), automotive companies now employ blackbox AI models to enable vehicles to perceive their environments and make driving decisions with little or no input from a human. With the hope to deploy autonomous vehicles (AV) on a commercial scale, the acceptance of AV by society becomes paramount and may largely depend on their degree of transparency, trustworthiness, and compliance with regulations. The assessment of the compliance of AVs to these acceptance requirements can be facilitated through the provision of explanations for AVs' behaviour. Explainability is therefore seen as an important requirement for AVs. AVs should be able to explain what they have 'seen', done, and might do in environments in which they operate. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the existing body of work around explainable autonomous driving. First, we open with a motivation for explanations by highlighting and emphasising the importance of transparency, accountability, and trust in AVs; and examining existing regulations and standards related to AVs. Second, we identify and categorise the different stakeholders involved in the development, use, and regulation of AVs and elicit their explanation requirements for AV. Third, we provide a rigorous review of previous work on explanations for the different AV operations (i.e., perception, localisation, planning, control, and system management). Finally, we identify pertinent challenges and provide recommendations, such as a conceptual framework for AV explainability. This survey aims to provide the fundamental knowledge required of researchers who are interested in explainability in AVs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Sense-Assess-eXplain (SAX): Building Trust in Autonomous Vehicles in Challenging Real-World Driving Scenarios

This paper discusses ongoing work in demonstrating research in mobile autonomy in challenging driving scenarios. In our approach, we address fundamental technical issues to overcome critical barriers to assurance and regulation for large-scale deployments of autonomous systems. To this end, we present how we build robots that (1) can robustly sense and interpret their environment using traditional as well as unconventional sensors; (2) can assess their own capabilities; and (3), vitally in the purpose of assurance and trust, can provide causal explanations of their interpretations and assessments. As it is essential that robots are safe and trusted, we design, develop, and demonstrate fundamental technologies in real-world applications to overcome critical barriers which impede the current deployment of robots in economically and socially important areas. Finally, we describe ongoing work in the collection of an unusual, rare, and highly valuable dataset.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

LiDAR Lateral Localisation Despite Challenging Occlusion from Traffic

This paper presents a system for improving the robustness of LiDAR lateral localisation systems. This is made possible by including detections of road boundaries which are invisible to the sensor (due to occlusion, e.g. traffic) but can be located by our Occluded Road Boundary Inference Deep Neural Network. We show an example application in which fusion of a camera stream is used to initialise the lateral localisation. We demonstrate over four driven forays through central Oxford - totalling 40 km of driving - a gain in performance that inferring of occluded road boundaries brings.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

Online Inference and Detection of Curbs in Partially Occluded Scenes with Sparse LIDAR

Road boundaries, or curbs, provide autonomous vehicles with essential information when interpreting road scenes and generating behaviour plans. Although curbs convey important information, they are difficult to detect in complex urban environments (in particular in comparison to other elements of the road such as traffic signs and road markings). These difficulties arise from occlusions by other traffic participants as well as changing lighting and/or weather conditions. Moreover, road boundaries have various shapes, colours and structures while motion planning algorithms require accurate and precise metric information in real-time to generate their plans. In this paper, we present a real-time LIDAR-based approach for accurate curb detection around the vehicle (360 degree). Our approach deals with both occlusions from traffic and changing environmental conditions. To this end, we project 3D LIDAR pointcloud data into 2D bird's-eye view images (akin to Inverse Perspective Mapping). These images are then processed by trained deep networks to infer both visible and occluded road boundaries. Finally, a post-processing step filters detected curb segments and tracks them over time. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on real-world driving data. Hence, we believe that our LIDAR-based approach provides an efficient and effective way to detect visible and occluded curbs around the vehicles in challenging driving scenarios.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

Generating All the Roads to Rome: Road Layout Randomization for Improved Road Marking Segmentation

Road markings provide guidance to traffic participants and enforce safe driving behaviour, understanding their semantic meaning is therefore paramount in (automated) driving. However, producing the vast quantities of road marking labels required for training state-of-the-art deep networks is costly, time-consuming, and simply infeasible for every domain and condition. In addition, training data retrieved from virtual worlds often lack the richness and complexity of the real world and consequently cannot be used directly. In this paper, we provide an alternative approach in which new road marking training pairs are automatically generated. To this end, we apply principles of domain randomization to the road layout and synthesize new images from altered semantic labels. We demonstrate that training on these synthetic pairs improves mIoU of the segmentation of rare road marking classes during real-world deployment in complex urban environments by more than 12 percentage points, while performance for other classes is retained. This framework can easily be scaled to all domains and conditions to generate large-scale road marking datasets, while avoiding manual labelling effort.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

The Right (Angled) Perspective: Improving the Understanding of Road Scenes Using Boosted Inverse Perspective Mapping

Many tasks performed by autonomous vehicles such as road marking detection, object tracking, and path planning are simpler in bird's-eye view. Hence, Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM) is often applied to remove the perspective effect from a vehicle's front-facing camera and to remap its images into a 2D domain, resulting in a top-down view. Unfortunately, however, this leads to unnatural blurring and stretching of objects at further distance, due to the resolution of the camera, limiting applicability. In this paper, we present an adversarial learning approach for generating a significantly improved IPM from a single camera image in real time. The generated bird's-eye-view images contain sharper features (e.g. road markings) and a more homogeneous illumination, while (dynamic) objects are automatically removed from the scene, thus revealing the underlying road layout in an improved fashion. We demonstrate our framework using real-world data from the Oxford RobotCar Dataset and show that scene understanding tasks directly benefit from our boosted IPM approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Artificial Intelligence for Long-Term Robot Autonomy: A Survey

Autonomous systems will play an essential role in many applications across diverse domains including space, marine, air, field, road, and service robotics. They will assist us in our daily routines and perform dangerous, dirty and dull tasks. However, enabling robotic systems to perform autonomously in complex, real-world scenarios over extended time periods (i.e. weeks, months, or years) poses many challenges. Some of these have been investigated by sub-disciplines of Artificial Intelligence (AI) including navigation & mapping, perception, knowledge representation & reasoning, planning, interaction, and learning. The different sub-disciplines have developed techniques that, when re-integrated within an autonomous system, can enable robots to operate effectively in complex, long-term scenarios. In this paper, we survey and discuss AI techniques as 'enablers' for long-term robot autonomy, current progress in integrating these techniques within long-running robotic systems, and the future challenges and opportunities for AI in long-term autonomy.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2016

The STRANDS Project: Long-Term Autonomy in Everyday Environments

Thanks to the efforts of the robotics and autonomous systems community, robots are becoming ever more capable. There is also an increasing demand from end-users for autonomous service robots that can operate in real environments for extended periods. In the STRANDS project we are tackling this demand head-on by integrating state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and robotics research into mobile service robots, and deploying these systems for long-term installations in security and care environments. Over four deployments, our robots have been operational for a combined duration of 104 days autonomously performing end-user defined tasks, covering 116km in the process. In this article we describe the approach we have used to enable long-term autonomous operation in everyday environments, and how our robots are able to use their long run times to improve their own performance.

cs.RO↗