CARE: Contrastive Representation Learning with Environment-Invariance Regularization for Behavioural Intention Prediction

Shang Gao, Zhixin Huang, Franz Götz-Hahn, Konrad Doll, Bernhard Sick

Trajectory-based behavioural intention prediction faces environmental variation, and representations learned with a pooled contrastive objective may retain environment-specific regularities. We present CARE, a self-supervised trajectory-learning framework that couples temporally asymmetric contrastive views with an invariant-risk-minimisation (IRM)-style gradient penalty on environment-wise contrastive risks. Each input window yields an anchor, a partially masked positive view, and a temporally perturbed negative view. Masked reconstruction and observability-aware evidence consistency complement this objective by promoting temporal information retention under partial input. On an IMPTC-derived four-class intention task, CARE achieves 0.840 accuracy and 0.023 expected calibration error (ECE) under IID fine-tuning, and 0.806 accuracy with a Brier score of 0.308 on the reported held-out environment. Under frozen-encoder linear probing, reconstruction provides the largest individual held-out accuracy gain, whereas the complete objective yields the lowest held-out ECE (0.049) among tested variants. These results support the combined objective as a competitive representation-learning…