SGDCL: Semantic-Guided Dynamic Correlation Learning for Explainable Autonomous Driving

Abstract

By learning expressive representations, deep learning (DL) has revolutionized autonomous driving (AD). Despite significant advancements, the inherent opacity of DL models engenders public distrust, impeding their widespread adoption. For explainable autonomous driving, current studies primarily concentrate on extracting features from input scenes to predict driving actions and their corresponding explanations. However, these methods underutilize semantics and correlation information within actions and explanations (collectively called categories in this work), leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose Semantic-Guided Dynamic Correlation Learning (SGDCL), a novel approach that effectively exploits semantic richness and dynamic interactions intrinsic to categories. SGDCL employs a semantic-guided learning module to obtain category-specific representations and a dynamic correlation learning module to adaptively capture intricate correlations among categories. Additionally, we introduce an innovative loss term to leverage fine-grained co-occurrence statistics of categories for refined regularization. We extensively evaluate SGDCL on two well-established benchmarks, demonstrating its superiority over seven state-of-the-art baselines and a large vision-language model. SGDCL significantly promotes explainable autonomous driving with up to 15.3% performance improvement and interpretable attention scores, bolstering public trust in AD.