On Trustworthy Decision-Making Process of Human Drivers from the View of Perceptual Uncertainty Reduction

TL;DR

This study investigates how human drivers actively reduce perceptual uncertainty during interactive driving tasks, using explainable AI and entropy measures to quantify perceptual changes, validated through highway merging scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a framework combining explainable AI and entropy measures to empirically analyze how drivers reduce perceptual uncertainty in decision-making.

Findings

Drivers actively seek information to lower perceptual uncertainty.

Perceptual uncertainty decreases as drivers focus on salient features.

Method validated in highway merging scenarios with congested traffic.

Abstract

Humans are experts in making decisions for challenging driving tasks with uncertainties. Many efforts have been made to model the decision-making process of human drivers at the behavior level. However, limited studies explain how human drivers actively make reliable sequential decisions to complete interactive driving tasks in an uncertain environment. This paper argues that human drivers intently search for actions to reduce the uncertainty of their perception of the environment, i.e., perceptual uncertainty, to a low level that allows them to make a trustworthy decision easily. This paper provides a proof of concept framework to empirically reveal that human drivers' perceptual uncertainty decreases when executing interactive tasks with uncertainties. We first introduce an explainable-artificial intelligence approach (i.e., SHapley Additive exPlanation, SHAP) to determine the salient features on which human drivers make decisions. Then, we use entropy-based measures to quantify the drivers' perceptual changes in these ranked salient features across the decision-making process, reflecting the changes in uncertainties. The validation and verification of our proposed method are conducted in the highway on-ramp merging scenario with congested traffic using the INTERACTION dataset. Experimental results support that human drivers intentionally seek information to reduce their perceptual uncertainties in the number and rank of salient features of their perception of environments to make a trustworthy decision.