Vehicle trajectory prediction is critical for advancing autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs). Deep learning-based approaches, especially those using transformer-based and generative models, have significantly improved prediction accuracy by capturing complex, non-linear patterns in vehicle dynamics and traffic interactions. However, they often overlook detailed car-following behaviors and the inter-vehicle interactions essential for real-world driving, particularly in fully autonomous or mixed traffic scenarios. Moreover, existing generative approaches in trajectory prediction are inefficient at conditioning predictions on relevant constraints. To address these issues, this study proposes FollowGen, a novel scaled noise conditional diffusion model for car-following trajectory prediction. FollowGen incorporates detailed inter-vehicular interactions and car-following dynamics within a generative framework, enhancing both the accuracy and realism of the predicted trajectories. The model uses a novel pipeline to capture historical vehicle behaviors. It leverages a noise scaling conditioning strategy to scale the noise with encoded historical features within the forward diffusion process to ensure history-constrained noise transformation. A cross-attention-based transformer architecture is employed in the reverse process to model intricate inter-vehicle dependencies, effectively guiding the denoising process and enhancing prediction accuracy. Experimental results in various real-world driving scenarios demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and robustness of the proposed method.

This study presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs’ behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.