Explaining autonomous driving with visual attention and end-to-end trainable region proposals

Abstract Autonomous driving is advancing at a fast pace, with driving algorithms becoming more and more accurate and reliable. Despite this, it is of utter importance to develop models that can offer a certain degree of explainability in order to be trusted, understood and accepted by researchers and, especially, society. In this work we present a conditional imitation learning agent based on a visual attention mechanism in order to provide visually explainable decisions by design. We propose different variations of the method, relying on end-to-end trainable regions proposal functions, generating regions of interest to be weighed by an attention module. We show that visual attention can improve driving capabilities and provide at the same time explainable decisions.