Contingencies from Observations: Tractable Contingency Planning with Learned Behavior Models

Abstract

Humans have a remarkable ability to accurately reason about future events, including the behaviors and states of mind of other agents. Consider driving a car through a busy intersection: it is necessary to reason about the physics of the vehicle, the intentions of other drivers, and their beliefs about your own intentions. For example, if you signal a turn, another driver might yield to you; or if you enter the passing lane, another driver might decelerate to give you room to merge in front. Competent drivers must plan how they can safely react to a variety of potential future behaviors of other agents before they make their next move. This requires contingency planning: explicitly planning a set of conditional actions that depend on the stochastic outcome of future events. In this work, we develop a general-purpose contingency planner that is learned end-to-end using high-dimensional scene observations and low-dimensional behavioral observations. We use a conditional autoregressive flow model for contingency planning. We show how this model can tractably learn contingencies from behavioral observations. We developed a closed-loop control benchmark of realistic multi-agent scenarios in a driving simulator (CARLA), on which we compare our method to various noncontingent methods that reason about multi-agent future behavior, and find that our contingency planning method achieves qualitatively and quantitatively superior performance.