DAMO: Dual-Attention with Multi-Objective Optimization for Explainable Autonomous Driving
Chengtai Cao, Shenglin Wang, Xinhong Chen, Yung‐Hui Li, Jianping Wang · Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications · 2025
Deep learning has revolutionized autonomous driving; nevertheless, its inherent opacity hinders explainability, an essential requirement for public trust and regulatory approval. Existing explainable autonomous driving research typically employs a multi-task framework, simultaneously generating driving actions and their corresponding explanations (collectively called categories). Most methods use a two-stage approach: extracting category-related features and modeling category correlations separately. This separation overlooks the potential synergy between these two processes. Moreover, existing approaches often rely on simple linear combinations of task-specific losses, which may fail to optimally balance action and explanation objectives. To address these limitations, we propose Dual-Attention with Multi-Objective optimization (DAMO). DAMO introduces a dual-attention mechanism that alternates between cross-attention for category representation learning and self-attention for category correlation modeling, fostering mutual enhancement. Additionally, we devise a multi-objective optimization algorithm that dynamically balances tasks and achieves Pareto optimality with theoretical guarantees. Extensive evaluations on two benchmarks show that DAMO surpasses state-of-the-art baselines and a large vision-language model, delivering up to 13.9% performance improvement and enhanced generalization across diverse driving scenarios.