Learning Personalized Discretionary Lane-Change Initiation for Fully Autonomous Driving Based on Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning approach to personalize lane-change initiation in autonomous vehicles, improving user acceptance by adapting to individual driving preferences without relying on human demonstrations.

Contribution

The study presents a novel offline reinforcement learning method for personalized lane-change tactics based on user feedback, enhancing autonomous driving customization.

Findings

Achieved an average accuracy of 86.1% in reproducing personal lane-change tactics.

Outperformed non-customized models with an average accuracy of 75.7%.

Enabled continuous improvement of driving personalization without human-driving data.

Abstract

In this article, the authors present a novel method to learn the personalized tactic of discretionary lane-change initiation for fully autonomous vehicles through human-computer interactions. Instead of learning from human-driving demonstrations, a reinforcement learning technique is employed to learn how to initiate lane changes from traffic context, the action of a self-driving vehicle, and in-vehicle user feedback. The proposed offline algorithm rewards the action-selection strategy when the user gives positive feedback and penalizes it when negative feedback. Also, a multi-dimensional driving scenario is considered to represent a more realistic lane-change trade-off. The results show that the lane-change initiation model obtained by this method can reproduce the personal lane-change tactic, and the performance of the customized models (average accuracy 86.1%) is much better than that of the non-customized models (average accuracy 75.7%). This method allows continuous improvement of customization for users during fully autonomous driving even without human-driving experience, which will significantly enhance the user acceptance of high-level autonomy of self-driving vehicles.