Scaling Motion Forecasting Models with Ensemble Distillation

Abstract: Motion forecasting has become an increasingly critical component of autonomous robotic systems. Onboard compute budgets typically limit the accuracy of real-time systems. In this work we propose methods of improving motion forecasting systems subject to limited compute budgets by combining model ensemble and distillation techniques. The use of ensembles of deep neural networks has been shown to improve generalization accuracy in many application domains. We first demonstrate significant performance gains by creating a large ensemble of optimized single models. We then develop a generalized framework to distill motion forecasting model ensembles into small student models which retain high performance with a fraction of the computing cost. For this study we focus on the task of motion forecasting using real world data from autonomous driving systems. We develop ensemble models that are very competitive on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) and Argoverse leaderboards. From these ensembles, we train distilled student models which have high performance at a fraction of the compute costs. These experiments demonstrate distillation from ensembles as an effective method for improving accuracy of predictive models for robotic systems with limited compute budgets.