Deep Object Centric Policies for Autonomous Driving

Abstract-- While learning visuomotor skills in an end-toend manner is appealing, deep neural networks are often uninterpretable and fail in surprising ways. For robotics tasks, such as autonomous driving, models that explicitly represent objects may be more robust to new scenes and provide intuitive visualizations. We describe a taxonomy of "object-centric" models which leverage both object instances and end-to-end learning. In the Grand Theft Auto V simulator, we show that object centric models outperform object-agnostic methods in scenes with other vehicles and pedestrians, even with an imperfect detector. We also demonstrate that our architectures perform well on real world environments by evaluating on the Berkeley DeepDrive Video dataset. I. INTRODUCTION End-to-end approaches to visuomotor learning are appealing in their ability to discover which features of an observed environment are most relevant for a task, and to be able to exploit large amounts of training data to discover both a policy and a codependent visual representation. Yet, the key benefit of such approaches--that they learn from task experience--is also their Achilles heel when it comes to many real-world settings, where behavioral training data is not unlimited and correct perception of "long-tail" visual phenomena can be critical for robust performance.