LC-LLM: Explainable lane-change intention and trajectory predictions with Large Language Models

To ensure safe driving in dynamic environments, autonomous vehicles should possess the capability to accurately predict lane change intentions of surrounding vehicles in advance and forecast their future trajectories. Existing motion prediction approaches have ample room for improvement, particularly in terms of long-term prediction accuracy and interpretability. In this study, we address these challenges by proposing a Lane Change-Large Language Model (LC-LLM), an explainable lane change prediction model that leverages the strong reasoning capabilities and self explanation abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Essentially, we reformulate the lane change prediction task as a language modeling problem, processing heterogeneous driving scenario information as natural language prompts for LLMs and employing supervised fine-tuning to tailor LLMs specifically for lane change prediction task. Additionally, we finetune the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve prediction transparency and reliability, and include explanatory requirements in the prompts during the inference stage. Therefore, our LC-LLM not only predicts lane change intentions and trajectories but also provides CoT reasoning and explanations for its predictions, enhancing its interpretability. Extensive experiments based on the large-scale highD dataset demonstrate the superior performance and interpretability of our LC-LLM in lane change prediction task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize LLMs for predicting lane change behavior. Our study shows that LLMs can effectively encode comprehensive interaction information for understanding driving behavior.