Causal Contrastive Learning with Data Augmentations for Imitation-Based Planning

Abstract

Motion planning is a difficult task, especially when generating feasible future trajectories in complex and interactive scenarios. While recent advancements in imitation-based planning have shown significant progress, this approach often encounters causal confusion in dynamic traffic environments. This confusion will cause the planner to incorrectly associate certain actions with outcomes, leading to suboptimal or unsafe plans. To address this, we introduce a novel framework called <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\overline{C}^{2}L$</tex>, which improves the planner's latent Causal understanding by incorporating Contrastive Learning and counterfactual data augmentation. Additionally, we propose a shortcut eliminator to extract copycat-free features from history states, reducing the impact of temporal spurious correlations. We validate our method on the nuPlan and interPlan benchmarks, with extensive experiments demonstrating that <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$C^{2}L$</tex> delivers highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.