TimelyNet: Adaptive Neural Architecture for Autonomous Driving with Dynamic Deadline

To maintain driving safety, the execution of neural network-based autonomous driving pipelines must meet the dynamic deadlines in response to the changing environment and vehicle’s velocity. To this end, this article proposes a real-time neural architecture adaptation approach, called TimelyNet, which uses a supernet to replace the most compute-intensive neural network module in an existing end-to-end autonomous driving pipeline. From the supernet, TimelyNet samples subnets with varying inference latency levels to meet the dynamic deadlines during run-time driving without fine-tuning. Specifically, TimelyNet employs a one-shot prediction method that jointly uses a lookup table and an invertible neural network to periodically determine the optimal hyperparameters of a subnet to meet its execution deadline while achieving the highest possible accuracy. The lookup table stores multiple subnet architectures with different latencies, while the invertible neural network models the distribution of the optimal subnet architecture given the latency. Extensive evaluation based on hardware-in-the-loop CARLA simulations shows that TimelyNet-integrated driving pipelines achieve the best driving safety, characterized by the lowest wrong-lane driving rate and zero collisions, compared with several baselines, including the state-of-the-art driving pipelines.