Towards Robust Unsupervised Attention Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Abstract: Robustly predicting attention regions of interest for self-driving systems is crucial for driving safety but presents significant challenges due to the labor-intensive nature of obtaining large-scale attention labels and the domain gap between self-driving scenarios and natural scenes. These challenges are further exacerbated by complex traffic environments, including camera corruption under adverse weather, noise interferences, and central bias from long-tail distributions. To address these issues, we propose a robust unsupervised attention prediction method. An Uncertainty Mining Branch refines predictions by analyzing commonalities and differences across multiple pre-trained models on natural scenes, while a Knowledge Embedding Block bridges the domain gap by incorporating driving knowledge to adaptively enhance pseudo-labels. Additionally, we introduce RoboMixup, a novel data augmentation method that improves robustness against corruption through soft attention and dynamic augmentation, and mitigates central bias by integrating random cropping into Mixup as a regularizer. To systematically evaluate robustness in self-driving attention prediction, we introduce the DriverAttention-C benchmark, comprising over 100k frames across three subsets: BDD-A-C, DR(eye)VE-C, and DADA-2000-C. Our method achieves performance equivalent to or surpassing fully supervised state-of-the-art approaches on three public datasets and the proposed robustness benchmark, reducing relative corruption degradation by 58.8% and 52.8%, and improving central bias robustness by 12.4% and 11.4% in KLD and CC metrics, respectively. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zaplm/DriverAttention.