Learn TAROT with MENTOR: A Meta-Learned Self-supervised Approach for Trajectory Prediction

Predicting diverse yet admissible trajectories that adhere to the map constraints is challenging. Graph-based scene encoders have been proven effective for preserving local structures of maps by defining lane-level connections. However, such encoders do not capture more complex patterns emerging from long-range heterogeneous connections between nonadjacent interacting lanes. To this end, we shed new light on learning common driving patterns by introducing meTA ROad paTh (TAROT) to formulate combinations of various relations between lanes on the road topology. Intuitively, this can be viewed as finding feasible routes. Furthermore, we propose MEta-road NeTwORk (MENTOR) that helps trajectory prediction by providing it with TAROT as navigation tips. More specifically, 1) we define TAROT prediction as a novel self-supervised proxy task to identify the complex heterogeneous structure of the map. 2) For typical driving actions, we establish several TAROTs that result in multiple Heterogeneous Structure Learning (HSL) tasks. These tasks are used in MENTOR, which performs meta-learning by simultaneously predicting trajectories along with proxy tasks, identifying an optimal combination of them, and automatically balancing them to improve the primary task. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse dataset, especially on diversity and admissibility metrics, achieving up to 20% improvements in challenging scenarios. We further investigate the contribution of proposed modules in ablation studies.