Efficient Equivariant Transformer for Self-Driving Agent Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Xu, Scott, Chen, Dian, Wong, Kelvin, Zhang, Chris, Fallah, Kion, Urtasun, Raquel
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Xu, Scott
Chen, Dian
Wong, Kelvin
Zhang, Chris
Fallah, Kion
Urtasun, Raquel
author_facet Xu, Scott
Chen, Dian
Wong, Kelvin
Zhang, Chris
Fallah, Kion
Urtasun, Raquel
contents Accurately modeling agent behaviors is an important task in self-driving. It is also a task with many symmetries, such as equivariance to the order of agents and objects in the scene or equivariance to arbitrary roto-translations of the entire scene as a whole; i.e., SE(2)-equivariance. The transformer architecture is a ubiquitous tool for modeling these symmetries. While standard self-attention is inherently permutation equivariant, explicit pairwise relative positional encodings have been the standard for introducing SE(2)-equivariance. However, this approach introduces an additional cost that is quadratic in the number of agents, limiting its scalability to larger scenes and batch sizes. In this work, we propose DriveGATr, a novel transformer-based architecture for agent modeling that achieves SE(2)-equivariance without the computational cost of existing methods. Inspired by recent advances in geometric deep learning, DriveGATr encodes scene elements as multivectors in the 2D projective geometric algebra $\mathbb{R}^*_{2,0,1}$ and processes them with a stack of equivariant transformer blocks. Crucially, DriveGATr models geometric relationships using standard attention between multivectors, eliminating the need for costly explicit pairwise relative positional encodings. Experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset demonstrate that DriveGATr is comparable to the state-of-the-art in traffic simulation and establishes a superior Pareto front for performance vs computational cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01466
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Equivariant Transformer for Self-Driving Agent Modeling
Xu, Scott
Chen, Dian
Wong, Kelvin
Zhang, Chris
Fallah, Kion
Urtasun, Raquel
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Accurately modeling agent behaviors is an important task in self-driving. It is also a task with many symmetries, such as equivariance to the order of agents and objects in the scene or equivariance to arbitrary roto-translations of the entire scene as a whole; i.e., SE(2)-equivariance. The transformer architecture is a ubiquitous tool for modeling these symmetries. While standard self-attention is inherently permutation equivariant, explicit pairwise relative positional encodings have been the standard for introducing SE(2)-equivariance. However, this approach introduces an additional cost that is quadratic in the number of agents, limiting its scalability to larger scenes and batch sizes. In this work, we propose DriveGATr, a novel transformer-based architecture for agent modeling that achieves SE(2)-equivariance without the computational cost of existing methods. Inspired by recent advances in geometric deep learning, DriveGATr encodes scene elements as multivectors in the 2D projective geometric algebra $\mathbb{R}^*_{2,0,1}$ and processes them with a stack of equivariant transformer blocks. Crucially, DriveGATr models geometric relationships using standard attention between multivectors, eliminating the need for costly explicit pairwise relative positional encodings. Experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset demonstrate that DriveGATr is comparable to the state-of-the-art in traffic simulation and establishes a superior Pareto front for performance vs computational cost.
title Efficient Equivariant Transformer for Self-Driving Agent Modeling
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01466