Saliency-Guided Domain Adaptation for Left-Hand Driving in Autonomous Steering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mehraban, Zahra, Glaser, Sebastien, Milford, Michael, Schroeter, Ronald
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Mehraban, Zahra
Glaser, Sebastien
Milford, Michael
Schroeter, Ronald
author_facet Mehraban, Zahra
Glaser, Sebastien
Milford, Michael
Schroeter, Ronald
contents Domain adaptation is required for automated driving models to generalize well across diverse road conditions. This paper explores a training method for domain adaptation to adapt PilotNet, an end-to-end deep learning-based model, for left-hand driving conditions using real-world Australian highway data. Four training methods were evaluated: (1) a baseline model trained on U.S. right-hand driving data, (2) a model trained on flipped U.S. data, (3) a model pretrained on U.S. data and then fine-tuned on Australian highways, and (4) a model pretrained on flipped U.S. data and then finetuned on Australian highways. This setup examines whether incorporating flipped data enhances the model adaptation by providing an initial left-hand driving alignment. The paper compares model performance regarding steering prediction accuracy and attention, using saliency-based analysis to measure attention shifts across significant road regions. Results show that pretraining on flipped data alone worsens prediction stability due to misaligned feature representations, but significantly improves adaptation when followed by fine-tuning, leading to lower prediction error and stronger focus on left-side cues. To validate this approach across different architectures, the same experiments were done on ResNet, which confirmed similar adaptation trends. These findings emphasize the importance of preprocessing techniques, such as flipped-data pretraining, followed by fine-tuning to improve model adaptation with minimal retraining requirements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01223
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Saliency-Guided Domain Adaptation for Left-Hand Driving in Autonomous Steering
Mehraban, Zahra
Glaser, Sebastien
Milford, Michael
Schroeter, Ronald
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Domain adaptation is required for automated driving models to generalize well across diverse road conditions. This paper explores a training method for domain adaptation to adapt PilotNet, an end-to-end deep learning-based model, for left-hand driving conditions using real-world Australian highway data. Four training methods were evaluated: (1) a baseline model trained on U.S. right-hand driving data, (2) a model trained on flipped U.S. data, (3) a model pretrained on U.S. data and then fine-tuned on Australian highways, and (4) a model pretrained on flipped U.S. data and then finetuned on Australian highways. This setup examines whether incorporating flipped data enhances the model adaptation by providing an initial left-hand driving alignment. The paper compares model performance regarding steering prediction accuracy and attention, using saliency-based analysis to measure attention shifts across significant road regions. Results show that pretraining on flipped data alone worsens prediction stability due to misaligned feature representations, but significantly improves adaptation when followed by fine-tuning, leading to lower prediction error and stronger focus on left-side cues. To validate this approach across different architectures, the same experiments were done on ResNet, which confirmed similar adaptation trends. These findings emphasize the importance of preprocessing techniques, such as flipped-data pretraining, followed by fine-tuning to improve model adaptation with minimal retraining requirements.
title Saliency-Guided Domain Adaptation for Left-Hand Driving in Autonomous Steering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01223