Towards Explainable Pedestrian Behavior Prediction: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Autonomous Driving

In the context of autonomous driving, predicting pedestrian behavior is a critical component for enhancing road safety. Currently, the focus of such predictions extends beyond accuracy and reliability, placing increasing emphasis on the explainability and interpretability of the models. This research presents a novel neuro-symbolic approach that integrates deep learning with fuzzy logic to develop a pedestrian behavior predictor. The proposed model leverages a set of explainable features and utilizes a fuzzy inference system to determine whether a pedestrian is likely to cross the street. The pipeline was trained and evaluated using both the Pedestrian Intention Estimation (PIE) and Joint Attention for Autonomous Driving (JAAD) datasets. The results provide experimental insights into achieving greater explainability in pedestrian behavior prediction. Additionally, the proposed method was applied to assess the data selection process through a series of experiments, leading to a set of guidelines and recommendations for data selection, feature engineering, and explainability.