On the Road to Portability: Compressing End-to-End Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Feng, Kaituo, Li, Changsheng, Ren, Dongchun, Yuan, Ye, Wang, Guoren
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Feng, Kaituo
Li, Changsheng
Ren, Dongchun
Yuan, Ye
Wang, Guoren
author_facet Feng, Kaituo
Li, Changsheng
Ren, Dongchun
Yuan, Ye
Wang, Guoren
contents End-to-end motion planning models equipped with deep neural networks have shown great potential for enabling full autonomous driving. However, the oversized neural networks render them impractical for deployment on resource-constrained systems, which unavoidably requires more computational time and resources during reference.To handle this, knowledge distillation offers a promising approach that compresses models by enabling a smaller student model to learn from a larger teacher model. Nevertheless, how to apply knowledge distillation to compress motion planners has not been explored so far. In this paper, we propose PlanKD, the first knowledge distillation framework tailored for compressing end-to-end motion planners. First, considering that driving scenes are inherently complex, often containing planning-irrelevant or even noisy information, transferring such information is not beneficial for the student planner. Thus, we design an information bottleneck based strategy to only distill planning-relevant information, rather than transfer all information indiscriminately. Second, different waypoints in an output planned trajectory may hold varying degrees of importance for motion planning, where a slight deviation in certain crucial waypoints might lead to a collision. Therefore, we devise a safety-aware waypoint-attentive distillation module that assigns adaptive weights to different waypoints based on the importance, to encourage the student to accurately mimic more crucial waypoints, thereby improving overall safety. Experiments demonstrate that our PlanKD can boost the performance of smaller planners by a large margin, and significantly reduce their reference time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_01238
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Road to Portability: Compressing End-to-End Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving
Feng, Kaituo
Li, Changsheng
Ren, Dongchun
Yuan, Ye
Wang, Guoren
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
End-to-end motion planning models equipped with deep neural networks have shown great potential for enabling full autonomous driving. However, the oversized neural networks render them impractical for deployment on resource-constrained systems, which unavoidably requires more computational time and resources during reference.To handle this, knowledge distillation offers a promising approach that compresses models by enabling a smaller student model to learn from a larger teacher model. Nevertheless, how to apply knowledge distillation to compress motion planners has not been explored so far. In this paper, we propose PlanKD, the first knowledge distillation framework tailored for compressing end-to-end motion planners. First, considering that driving scenes are inherently complex, often containing planning-irrelevant or even noisy information, transferring such information is not beneficial for the student planner. Thus, we design an information bottleneck based strategy to only distill planning-relevant information, rather than transfer all information indiscriminately. Second, different waypoints in an output planned trajectory may hold varying degrees of importance for motion planning, where a slight deviation in certain crucial waypoints might lead to a collision. Therefore, we devise a safety-aware waypoint-attentive distillation module that assigns adaptive weights to different waypoints based on the importance, to encourage the student to accurately mimic more crucial waypoints, thereby improving overall safety. Experiments demonstrate that our PlanKD can boost the performance of smaller planners by a large margin, and significantly reduce their reference time.
title On the Road to Portability: Compressing End-to-End Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01238