Multi-modal Integrated Prediction and Decision-making with Adaptive Interaction Modality Explorations

Navigating dense and dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous driving systems, owing to the intricate nature of multimodal interaction, wherein the actions of various traffic participants and the autonomous vehicle are complex and implicitly coupled. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Multimodal Integrated predictioN and Decision-making (MIND), which addresses the challenges by efficiently generating joint predictions and decisions covering multiple distinctive interaction modalities. Specifically, MIND leverages learning-based scenario predictions to obtain integrated predictions and decisions with socially-consistent interaction modality and utilizes a modality-aware dynamic branching mechanism to generate scenario trees that efficiently capture the evolutions of distinctive interaction modalities with low growth of interaction uncertainty along the planning horizon. The scenario trees are seamlessly utilized by the contingency planning under interaction uncertainty to obtain clear and considerate maneuvers accounting for multimodal evolutions. Comprehensive experimental results in the closed-loop simulation based on the real-world driving dataset showcase superior performance to other strong baselines under various driving contexts. Code is available at: https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/MIND.