Robustness and Adaptability of Reinforcement Learning based Cooperative Autonomous Driving in Mixed-autonomy Traffic

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Valiente, Rodolfo, Toghi, Behrad, Pedarsani, Ramtin, Fallah, Yaser P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Valiente, Rodolfo
Toghi, Behrad
Pedarsani, Ramtin
Fallah, Yaser P.
author_facet Valiente, Rodolfo
Toghi, Behrad
Pedarsani, Ramtin
Fallah, Yaser P.
contents Building autonomous vehicles (AVs) is a complex problem, but enabling them to operate in the real world where they will be surrounded by human-driven vehicles (HVs) is extremely challenging. Prior works have shown the possibilities of creating inter-agent cooperation between a group of AVs that follow a social utility. Such altruistic AVs can form alliances and affect the behavior of HVs to achieve socially desirable outcomes. We identify two major challenges in the co-existence of AVs and HVs. First, social preferences and individual traits of a given human driver, e.g., selflessness and aggressiveness are unknown to an AV, and it is almost impossible to infer them in real-time during a short AV-HV interaction. Second, contrary to AVs that are expected to follow a policy, HVs do not necessarily follow a stationary policy and therefore are extremely hard to predict. To alleviate the above-mentioned challenges, we formulate the mixed-autonomy problem as a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problem and propose a decentralized framework and reward function for training cooperative AVs. Our approach enables AVs to learn the decision-making of HVs implicitly from experience, optimizes for a social utility while prioritizing safety and allowing adaptability; robustifying altruistic AVs to different human behaviors and constraining them to a safe action space. Finally, we investigate the robustness, safety and sensitivity of AVs to various HVs behavioral traits and present the settings in which the AVs can learn cooperative policies that are adaptable to different situations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2202_00881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robustness and Adaptability of Reinforcement Learning based Cooperative Autonomous Driving in Mixed-autonomy Traffic
Valiente, Rodolfo
Toghi, Behrad
Pedarsani, Ramtin
Fallah, Yaser P.
Robotics
Machine Learning
Building autonomous vehicles (AVs) is a complex problem, but enabling them to operate in the real world where they will be surrounded by human-driven vehicles (HVs) is extremely challenging. Prior works have shown the possibilities of creating inter-agent cooperation between a group of AVs that follow a social utility. Such altruistic AVs can form alliances and affect the behavior of HVs to achieve socially desirable outcomes. We identify two major challenges in the co-existence of AVs and HVs. First, social preferences and individual traits of a given human driver, e.g., selflessness and aggressiveness are unknown to an AV, and it is almost impossible to infer them in real-time during a short AV-HV interaction. Second, contrary to AVs that are expected to follow a policy, HVs do not necessarily follow a stationary policy and therefore are extremely hard to predict. To alleviate the above-mentioned challenges, we formulate the mixed-autonomy problem as a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problem and propose a decentralized framework and reward function for training cooperative AVs. Our approach enables AVs to learn the decision-making of HVs implicitly from experience, optimizes for a social utility while prioritizing safety and allowing adaptability; robustifying altruistic AVs to different human behaviors and constraining them to a safe action space. Finally, we investigate the robustness, safety and sensitivity of AVs to various HVs behavioral traits and present the settings in which the AVs can learn cooperative policies that are adaptable to different situations.
title Robustness and Adaptability of Reinforcement Learning based Cooperative Autonomous Driving in Mixed-autonomy Traffic
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00881