CUQDS: Conformal Uncertainty Quantification Under Distribution Shift for Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction models that can infer both future trajectories and their associated uncertainties of the target vehicles is crucial for safe and robust navigation and path planning of autonomous vehicles. However, the majority of existing trajectory prediction models have neither considered reducing the uncertainty as one objective during the training stage nor provided reliable uncertainty quantification during inference stage, especially under potential distribution shift. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the Conformal Uncertainty Quantification under Distribution Shift framework, CUQDS, to quantify the uncertainty of the predicted trajectories of existing trajectory prediction models under potential data distribution shift, while improving the prediction accuracy of the models and reducing the estimated uncertainty during the training stage. Specifically, CUQDS includes 1) a learning-based Gaussian process regression module that models the output distribution of the base model (any existing trajectory prediction neural networks) and reduces the estimated uncertainty by an additional loss term, and 2) a statistical-based Conformal P control module to calibrate the estimated uncertainty from the Gaussian process regression module in an online setting under potential distribution shift between training and testing data. Experimental results on various state-of-the-art methods using benchmark motion forecasting datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design.