arXiv subjects

Xiaocong Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaocong Zhao.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Toward Cooperative Driving in Mixed Traffic: An Adaptive Potential Game-Based Approach with Field Test Verification

Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), which represent a significant advancement in autonomous driving technology, have the potential to greatly increase traffic safety and efficiency through cooperative decision-making. However, existing methods often overlook the individual needs and heterogeneity of cooperative participants, making it difficult to transfer them to environments where they coexist with human-driven vehicles (HDVs).To address this challenge, this paper proposes an adaptive potential game (APG) cooperative driving framework. First, the system utility function is established on the basis of a general form of individual utility and its monotonic relationship, allowing for the simultaneous optimization of both individual and system objectives. Second, the Shapley value is introduced to compute each vehicle's marginal utility within the system, allowing its varying impact to be quantified. Finally, the HDV preference estimation is dynamically refined by continuously comparing the observed HDV behavior with the APG's estimated actions, leading to improvements in overall system safety and efficiency. Ablation studies demonstrate that adaptively updating Shapley values and HDV preference estimation significantly improve cooperation success rates in mixed traffic. Comparative experiments further highlight the APG's advantages in terms of safety and efficiency over other cooperative methods. Moreover, the applicability of the approach to real-world scenarios was validated through field tests.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Bounded-Rationality Modeling of Early-Stage Takeover in Shared-Control Driving

Human drivers' control quality in the first seconds after a handover is critical to shared-driving safety; potentially unsafe steering or pedal inputs therefore require detection and correction by the automated vehicle's safety-fallback system. Yet performance in this window is vulnerable because cognitive states fluctuate rapidly, causing purely rationality-driven, cognition-unaware models to miss early control dynamics. We present an interpretable driver model grounded in bounded rationality with online adaptation that predicts early-stage control quality. We encode boundedness by embedding cognitive constraints in reinforcement learning and adapt latent cognitive parameters in real time via particle filtering from observations of driver actions. In a vehicle-in-the-loop study (n=41), we evaluated predictive performance and physiological validity. The adaptive model not only anticipated hazardous takeovers with higher coverage and longer lead times than non-adaptive baselines but also demonstrated strong alignment between inferred cognitive parameters and real-time eye-tracking metrics. These results confirm that the model captures genuine fluctuations in driver risk perception, enabling timely and cognitively grounded assistance.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

CogDrive: Cognition-Driven Multimodal Prediction-Planning Fusion for Safe Autonomy

Safe autonomous driving in mixed traffic requires a unified understanding of multimodal interactions and dynamic planning under uncertainty. Existing learning based approaches struggle to capture rare but safety critical behaviors, while rule based systems often lack adaptability in complex interactions. To address these limitations, CogDrive introduces a cognition driven multimodal prediction and planning framework that integrates explicit modal reasoning with safety aware trajectory optimization. The prediction module adopts cognitive representations of interaction modes based on topological motion semantics and nearest neighbor relational encoding. With a differentiable modal loss and multimodal Gaussian decoding, CogDrive learns sparse and unbalanced interaction behaviors and improves long horizon trajectory prediction. The planning module incorporates an emergency response concept and optimizes safety stabilized trajectories, where short term consistent branches ensure safety during replanning cycles and long term branches support smooth and collision free motion under low probability switching modes. Experiments on Argoverse2 and INTERACTION datasets show that CogDrive achieves strong performance in trajectory accuracy and miss rate, while closed loop simulations confirm adaptive behavior in merge and intersection scenarios. By combining cognitive multimodal prediction with safety oriented planning, CogDrive offers an interpretable and reliable paradigm for safe autonomy in complex traffic.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Complementary Learning System Empowers Online Continual Learning of Vehicle Motion Forecasting in Smart Cities

Artificial intelligence underpins most smart city services, yet deep neural network (DNN) that forecasts vehicle motion still struggle with catastrophic forgetting, the loss of earlier knowledge when models are updated. Conventional fixes enlarge the training set or replay past data, but these strategies incur high data collection costs, sample inefficiently and fail to balance long- and short-term experience, leaving them short of human-like continual learning. Here we introduce Dual-LS, a task-free, online continual learning paradigm for DNN-based motion forecasting that is inspired by the complementary learning system of the human brain. Dual-LS pairs two synergistic memory rehearsal replay mechanisms to accelerate experience retrieval while dynamically coordinating long-term and short-term knowledge representations. Tests on naturalistic data spanning three countries, over 772,000 vehicles and cumulative testing mileage of 11,187 km show that Dual-LS mitigates catastrophic forgetting by up to 74.31\% and reduces computational resource demand by up to 94.02\%, markedly boosting predictive stability in vehicle motion forecasting without inflating data requirements. Meanwhile, it endows DNN-based vehicle motion forecasting with computation efficient and human-like continual learning adaptability fit for smart cities.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Escaping Stability-Plasticity Dilemma in Online Continual Learning for Motion Forecasting via Synergetic Memory Rehearsal

Deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved remarkable success in motion forecasting. However, most DNN-based methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and fail to maintain their performance in previously learned scenarios after adapting to new data. Recent continual learning (CL) studies aim to mitigate this phenomenon by enhancing memory stability of DNN, i.e., the ability to retain learned knowledge. Yet, excessive emphasis on the memory stability often impairs learning plasticity, i.e., the capacity of DNN to acquire new information effectively. To address such stability-plasticity dilemma, this study proposes a novel CL method, synergetic memory rehearsal (SyReM), for DNN-based motion forecasting. SyReM maintains a compact memory buffer to represent learned knowledge. To ensure memory stability, it employs an inequality constraint that limits increments in the average loss over the memory buffer. Synergistically, a selective memory rehearsal mechanism is designed to enhance learning plasticity by selecting samples from the memory buffer that are most similar to recently observed data. This selection is based on an online-measured cosine similarity of loss gradients, ensuring targeted memory rehearsal. Since replayed samples originate from learned scenarios, this memory rehearsal mechanism avoids compromising memory stability. We validate SyReM under an online CL paradigm where training samples from diverse scenarios arrive as a one-pass stream. Experiments on 11 naturalistic driving datasets from INTERACTION demonstrate that, compared to non-CL and CL baselines, SyReM significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting in past scenarios while improving forecasting accuracy in new ones. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-Jack/SyReM.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

H2C: Hippocampal Circuit-inspired Continual Learning for Lifelong Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Deep learning (DL) has shown state-of-the-art performance in trajectory prediction, which is critical to safe navigation in autonomous driving (AD). However, most DL-based methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to a new distribution may cause significant performance degradation in previously learned ones. Such inability to retain learned knowledge limits their applicability in the real world, where AD systems need to operate across varying scenarios with dynamic distributions. As revealed by neuroscience, the hippocampal circuit plays a crucial role in memory replay, effectively reconstructing learned knowledge based on limited resources. Inspired by this, we propose a hippocampal circuit-inspired continual learning method (H2C) for trajectory prediction across varying scenarios. H2C retains prior knowledge by selectively recalling a small subset of learned samples. First, two complementary strategies are developed to select the subset to represent learned knowledge. Specifically, one strategy maximizes inter-sample diversity to represent the distinctive knowledge, and the other estimates the overall knowledge by equiprobable sampling. Then, H2C updates via a memory replay loss function calculated by these selected samples to retain knowledge while learning new data. Experiments based on various scenarios from the INTERACTION dataset are designed to evaluate H2C. Experimental results show that H2C reduces catastrophic forgetting of DL baselines by 22.71% on average in a task-free manner, without relying on manually informed distributional shifts. The implementation is available at https://github.com/BIT-Jack/H2C-lifelong.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

InterHub: A Naturalistic Trajectory Dataset with Dense Interaction for Autonomous Driving

The driving interaction-a critical yet complex aspect of daily driving-lies at the core of autonomous driving research. However, real-world driving scenarios sparsely capture rich interaction events, limiting the availability of comprehensive trajectory datasets for this purpose. To address this challenge, we present InterHub, a dense interaction dataset derived by mining interaction events from extensive naturalistic driving records. We employ formal methods to describe and extract multi-agent interaction events, exposing the limitations of existing autonomous driving solutions. Additionally, we introduce a user-friendly toolkit enabling the expansion of InterHub with both public and private data. By unifying, categorizing, and analyzing diverse interaction events, InterHub facilitates cross-comparative studies and large-scale research, thereby advancing the evaluation and development of autonomous driving technologies.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Towards Interactive Autonomous Vehicle Testing: Vehicle-Under-Test-Centered Traffic Simulation

The simulation-based testing is essential for safely implementing autonomous vehicles (AV) on roads, necessitating simulated traffic environments that dynamically interact with the Vehicle Under Test (VUT). This study introduces a VUT-Centered environmental Dynamics Inference (VCDI) model for realistic, interactive, and diverse background traffic simulation. Serving the purpose of AV testing, VCDI employs Transformer-based modules in a conditional trajectory inference framework to simulate VUT-centered driving interaction events. First, the VUT future motion is taken as an augmented model input to bridge the action dependence between VUT and background objects. Second, to enrich the scenario diversity, a Gaussian-distributional cost function module is designed to capture the uncertainty of the VUT's strategy, triggering various scenario evolution. Experimental results validate VCDI's trajectory-level simulation precision which outperforms the state-of-the-art trajectory prediction work. The flexibility of the distributional cost function allows VCDI to provide diverse-yet-realistic scenarios for AV testing. We demonstrate such capability by modifying the anticipation to the VUT's cost-based strategy and thus achieve multiple testing scenarios with explainable background traffic evolution. Codes are available at https://github.com/YNYSNL/VCDI.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

DDM-Lag : A Diffusion-based Decision-making Model for Autonomous Vehicles with Lagrangian Safety Enhancement

Decision-making stands as a pivotal component in the realm of autonomous vehicles (AVs), playing a crucial role in navigating the intricacies of autonomous driving. Amidst the evolving landscape of data-driven methodologies, enhancing decision-making performance in complex scenarios has emerged as a prominent research focus. Despite considerable advancements, current learning-based decision-making approaches exhibit potential for refinement, particularly in aspects of policy articulation and safety assurance. To address these challenges, we introduce DDM-Lag, a Diffusion Decision Model, augmented with Lagrangian-based safety enhancements. This work conceptualizes the sequential decision-making challenge inherent in autonomous driving as a problem of generative modeling, adopting diffusion models as the medium for assimilating patterns of decision-making. We introduce a hybrid policy update strategy for diffusion models, amalgamating the principles of behavior cloning and Q-learning, alongside the formulation of an Actor-Critic architecture for the facilitation of updates. To augment the model's exploration process with a layer of safety, we incorporate additional safety constraints, employing a sophisticated policy optimization technique predicated on Lagrangian relaxation to refine the policy learning endeavor comprehensively. Empirical evaluation of our proposed decision-making methodology was conducted across a spectrum of driving tasks, distinguished by their varying degrees of complexity and environmental contexts. The comparative analysis with established baseline methodologies elucidates our model's superior performance, particularly in dimensions of safety and holistic efficacy.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Measuring Sociality in Driving Interaction

Interacting with other human road users is one of the most challenging tasks for autonomous vehicles. For congruent driving behaviors, it is essential to recognize and comprehend sociality, encompassing both implicit social norms and individualized social preferences of human drivers. To understand and quantify the complex sociality in driving interactions, we propose a Virtual-Game-based Interaction Model (VGIM) that is parameterized by a social preference measurement, Interaction Preference Value (IPV). The IPV is designed to capture the driver's relative inclination towards individual rewards over group rewards. A method for identifying IPV from observed driving trajectory is also developed, with which we assessed human drivers' IPV using driving data recorded in a typical interactive driving scenario, the unprotected left turn. Our findings reveal that (1) human drivers exhibit particular social preference patterns while undertaking specific tasks, such as turning left or proceeding straight; (2) competitive actions could be strategically conducted by human drivers in order to coordinate with others. Finally, we discuss the potential of learning sociality-aware navigation from human demonstrations by incorporating a rule-based humanlike IPV expressing strategy into VGIM and optimization-based motion planners. Simulation experiments demonstrate that (1) IPV identification improves the motion prediction performance in interactive driving scenarios and (2) the dynamic IPV expressing strategy extracted from human driving data makes it possible to reproduce humanlike coordination patterns in the driving interaction.

cs.RO↗