Driving with Regulation: Trustworthy and Interpretable Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper introduces DriveReg, an interpretable framework for autonomous driving that uses retrieval-augmented reasoning to understand and follow region-specific traffic regulations, enhancing safety and trust.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel regulation-aware decision-making framework combining retrieval-augmented retrieval and large language model reasoning for autonomous vehicles.

Findings

Effective regulation understanding demonstrated on DriveReg Dataset

Robust performance across diverse urban environments

Enhanced interpretability and safety compliance

Abstract

Understanding and adhering to traffic regulations is essential for autonomous vehicles to ensure safety and trustworthiness. However, traffic regulations are complex, context-dependent, and differ between regions, posing a major challenge to conventional rule-based decision-making approaches. We present an interpretable, regulation-aware decision-making framework, DriveReg, which enables autonomous vehicles to understand and adhere to region-specific traffic laws and safety guidelines. The framework integrates a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Traffic Regulation Retrieval Agent, which retrieves relevant rules from regulatory documents based on the current situation, and a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Reasoning Agent that evaluates actions for legal compliance and safety. Our design emphasizes interpretability to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce the DriveReg Scenarios Dataset, a comprehensive dataset of driving scenarios across Boston, Singapore, and Los Angeles, with both hypothesized text-based cases and real-world driving data, constructed and annotated to evaluate models' capacity for regulation understanding and reasoning. We validate our framework on the DriveReg Scenarios Dataset and real-world deployment, demonstrating strong performance and robustness across diverse environments.