Data-Centric Optimization of Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction via Intelligent Dataset Generation
Keywords:
autonomous driving, trajectory prediction, data-centric artificial intelligence, dataset generation, simulation, robustness, fairness, governance, infrastructure, safetyAbstract
Autonomous driving trajectory prediction has largely advanced through model-centric innovations, yet its real-world reliability remains constrained by data scarcity, imbalance, distribution shift, and weak representativeness. This paper examines data-centric optimization of trajectory prediction through intelligent dataset generation as a system-level strategy rather than a narrow preprocessing technique. It argues that dataset generation must be treated as an infrastructural capability that couples perception, simulation, curation, validation, governance, and deployment feedback. By synthesizing literature on driving datasets, motion forecasting, simulation, data-centric artificial intelligence, and safety governance, the paper identifies structural trade-offs among realism, coverage, cost, fairness, and maintainability. It further analyzes architectural implications for autonomous driving stacks, including how generated data can support rare-event augmentation, interactive scenario stress testing, and continuous lifecycle improvement. Special attention is given to robustness, fairness, sustainability, and policy because generated datasets can either amplify or mitigate long-standing asymmetries in road-user representation. The paper also considers evaluation regimes that move beyond aggregate error metrics toward density balance, scenario validity, and socio-technical accountability. The central claim is that intelligent dataset generation should be governed as a public-interest infrastructure, with transparent provenance, versioning, auditing, and cross-institutional coordination. Without such governance, data-centric gains may remain brittle and difficult to certify. With it, trajectory prediction can become more adaptable, equitable, and deployable across diverse urban and regulatory contexts. The conclusion outlines a research agenda spanning synthetic-real hybrid pipelines, simulation fidelity, evaluation pluralism, and lifecycle sustainability.
References
1. Geiger, A., Lenz, P., & Urtasun, R. (2012). Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 3354-3361). IEEE.
2. Caesar, H., Bankiti, V., Lang, A. H., Vora, S., Liong, V. E., Xu, Q., Krishnan, A., Pan, Y., Baldan, G., & Beijbom, O. (2020). nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 11621-11631). IEEE.
3. Chang, M.-F., Lambert, J., Sangkloy, P., Singh, J., Bak, S., Hartnett, A., Wang, D., Carr, P., Lucey, S., Ramanan, D., & Hays, J. (2019). Argoverse: 3D tracking and forecasting with rich maps. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 8748-8757). IEEE.
4. Zhan, W., Sun, L., Wang, D., Shi, H., Clausse, A., Naumann, M., Kummerle, J., Konigshof, H., Stiller, C., de La Fortelle, A., & Tomizuka, M. (2019). Interaction dataset: An international, adversarial and cooperative motion dataset in interactive driving scenarios with semantic maps. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.03088.
5. Ettinger, S., Cheng, S., Caine, B., Liu, C., Zhao, H., Pradhan, S., Chai, Y., Sapp, B., Qi, C. R., Zhou, Y., Yang, Z., Chouard, A., Sun, P., Ngiam, J., Vasudevan, V., McCauley, A., Shlens, J., & Anguelov, D. (2021). Large scale interactive motion forecasting for autonomous driving: The Waymo open motion dataset. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 9710-9719). IEEE.
6. Schwarting, W., Alonso-Mora, J., & Rus, D. (2018). Planning and decision-making for autonomous vehicles. Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, 1, 187-210.
7. Lefevre, S., Vasquez, D., & Laugier, C. (2014). A survey on motion prediction and risk assessment for intelligent vehicles. ROBOMECH Journal, 1, 1.
8. Saleh, K., Hossny, M., & Nahavandi, S. (2018). Towards trusted autonomous vehicles from vulnerable road users perspective. In Proceedings of the IEEE Systems Conference (pp. 1-7). IEEE.
9. Rasouli, A., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2020). Autonomous vehicles that interact with pedestrians: A survey of theory and practice. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 21(3), 900-918.
10. Chen, L., Wu, P., Chitta, K., Jaeger, B., Geiger, A., & Li, H. (2024). End-to-end autonomous driving: Challenges and frontiers. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 46(12), 9866-9883.
11. Zha, D., Bhat, Z. P., Lai, K.-H., Yang, F., Jiang, Z., Zhong, S., & Hu, X. (2023). Data-centric artificial intelligence: A survey. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.10158.
12. Yang, R., Xu, Y., Fu, Y., & Su, L. (2026). Den-tp: A density-balanced data curation and evaluation framework for trajectory prediction. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 10632-10641).
13. Sun, P., Kretzschmar, H., Dotiwalla, X., Chouard, A., Patnaik, V., Tsui, P., Guo, J., Zhou, Y., Chai, Y., Caine, B., Vasudevan, V., Han, W., Ngiam, J., Zhao, H., Timofeev, A., Ettinger, S., Krivokon, M., Gao, A., Joshi, A., Zhang, Y., Shlens, J., Chen, M., & Anguelov, D. (2020). Scalability in perception for autonomous driving: Waymo open dataset. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 2446-2454). IEEE.
14. Dosovitskiy, A., Ros, G., Codevilla, F., Lopez, A., & Koltun, V. (2017). CARLA: An open urban driving simulator. In Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Robot Learning (pp. 1-16). PMLR.
15. Shah, S., Dey, D., Lovett, C., & Kapoor, A. (2018). AirSim: High-fidelity visual and physical simulation for autonomous vehicles. In Field and Service Robotics (pp. 621-635). Springer.
16. Favarò, F. M., Nader, N., Eurich, S. O., Tripp, M., & Varadarajan, N. (2017). Examining accident reports involving autonomous vehicles in California. PLOS ONE, 12(9), e0184952.
17. Kohli, P., & Chadha, A. (2020). Enabling pedestrian safety using computer vision techniques: A case study of the 2018 Uber fatal crash. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (pp. 5246-5252). IEEE.
18. Amodei, D., Olah, C., Steinhardt, J., Christiano, P., Schulman, J., & Mané, D. (2016). Concrete problems in AI safety. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.06565.
19. Mittelstadt, B. D., Allo, P., Taddeo, M., Wachter, S., & Floridi, L. (2016). The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 1-21.
20. Shalev-Shwartz, S., Shammah, S., & Shashua, A. (2017). On a formal model of safe and scalable self-driving cars. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.06374.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.