BehaviorGPT Team wins the 1st in the 2024 Waymo Open Dataset Sim Agents Challenge

The team BehaviorGPT had secured the First Place at the Sim Agents Challenge of the 2024 Waymo Open Dataset Challenges on 20 June.  The team comprised Prof Jianping Wang, Prof Nan Guan, Research Associate Xinhong Chen and two CS PhD students Zikang Zhou and Haibo Hu, in collaboration with Visiting Professor Kui Wu from University of Victoria, Prof Chun Jason Xue of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Dr Yung-Hui Li of Hon Hai Research Institute and PhD student Yu-Kai Huang of Carnegie Mellon University. The prizes for second place is $10,000 in Google Cloud credits.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in California.  In 2019, Waymo publicly released the Waymo Open Dataset to support the AI research community in exploring various aspects of machine perception and autonomous driving technology.  In the Sim Agents Challenge, the teams were given the agent tracks for the past 1 second on a corresponding map, and optionally the associated lidar for this time interval, then they were tasked with simulating 32 realistic joint futures for all the agents in the scene. 

The team developed a generative model using GPT-style Transformers, which can simulate diverse behaviors of traffic participants with high realism. The simulation capability offered by this technology will enable fast and large-scale validation of autonomous driving systems, paving the way toward safer and more reliable autonomy solutions. The contributions of the team in the Challenges have significantly aided Waymo in advancing the cutting-edge AI research.