Evolutionary Physics-Informed Temporal Fusion for Lane-Change Intention Prediction

Early recognition of lane-change intention is essential for proactive decision-making in autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. This paper proposes a Dual Neural-Calibrated Interacting Multiple Model (DNC-IMM) that improves adaptability to driving context while preserving the probabilistic structure and interpretability of a conventional IMM. The proposed method encodes driving-context information, including target-vehicle motion, gaps to surrounding vehicles, and relative velocities, with a neural network that calibrates both the transition-probability matrix and measurement likelihoods. The final intention is determined from the calibrated IMM mode posterior rather than from a separate direct classifier. Experiments on the highD dataset demonstrate that the proposed method reliably recognizes lane-change intentions before lane crossing and provides particularly strong performance at the earlier 2-3 s prediction horizons.

Safe motion planning in advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicles requires an accurate understanding of how the surrounding traffic scene is likely to evolve. However, many existing lane-change prediction methods remain centered on a single target vehicle, while multi-agent forecasting approaches often describe scene evolution only through future positions and provide limited explicit information about the maneuver associated with each vehicle. This study proposes a dynamic scene graph attention framework that predicts the lane-change intention and future trajectory of every relevant vehicle within a local traffic scene. The scene is represented as a time-varying interaction graph in which vehicles are modeled as nodes and their spatial and kinematic relationships are encoded through explicit edge features. Temporal graph-attention message passing captures evolving inter-vehicle dependencies and pre-maneuver cues, while an intention-guided decoder links each predicted maneuver to its corresponding future motion. A scene-level consistency objective further encourages compatible multi-vehicle futures. Experiments on the NGSIM I-80, NGSIM US-101, and highD datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over competing baselines. DSiGAT achieves intention prediction accuracies of 90.12% and 90.97% on NGSIM I-80 and US-101, respectively, and reduces trajectory RMSE by up to 52.94% relative to the strongest baseline. It also produces lower inter-agent collision rates and joint displacement errors, indicating more coherent scene-level predictions. Ablation, sensitivity, robustness, and qualitative analyses further validate the contribution of the proposed components and the effectiveness of the scene-focused formulation.

Lane-change prediction is a central task in intelligent vehicles, where early maneuver anticipation can support safer decision-making. However, many existing approaches mainly learn statistical associations between observed driving variables and future maneuvers, while overlooking the causal dependencies among the input variables themselves. This limits interpretability, especially when physically related variables such as longitudinal gap, relative longitudinal velocity, and Time-To-Collision (TTC) are treated as independent flat inputs. This article presents a causal-inference-based framework for lane-change prediction and explanation. The proposed approach combines linguistic feature construction, expert-constrained causal discovery, deep structural causal modeling with Deep End-to-end Causal Inference (DECI), intervention-based effect analysis, refutation testing, and recursive causal-chain explanation. The objective is not only to predict the future maneuver, but also to identify candidate variables that directly contribute to the prediction, the upstream factors influencing them, and the causal chains through which these effects propagate. The framework achieves average F1-scores above 95% during the first three seconds before the lane-marking crossing event. Beyond prediction accuracy, the framework uses intervention-based effect analysis to distinguish influential from weakly influential variables under the learned causal structure. It further distinguishes candidate direct contributors from mediated effects and generates contrastive causal-chain explanations that clarify why the predicted maneuver is favored and why the alternative maneuvers are less supported. The main contribution is therefore a mechanism-aware lane-change prediction pipeline that moves beyond correlation-based classification toward more interpretable causal reasoning for maneuver prediction.