Grounded Relational Inference: Domain Knowledge Driven Explainable Autonomous Driving

Explainability is essential for autonomous vehicles and other robotics systems interacting with humans and other objects during operation. Humans need to understand and anticipate the actions taken by the machines for trustful and safe cooperation. In this work, we aim to enable the explainability of an autonomous driving system at the design stage by incorporating expert domain knowledge into the model. We propose Grounded Relational Inference (GRI). It models an interactive system's underlying dynamics by inferring an interaction graph representing the agents' relations. We ensure an interpretable interaction graph by grounding the relational latent space into semantic behaviors defined with expert domain knowledge. We demonstrate that it can model interactive traffic scenarios under both simulation and real-world settings, and generate interpretable graphs explaining the vehicle's behavior by their interactions.