Socially-Aware Autonomous Driving: Inferring Yielding Intentions for Safer Interactions

Since the emergence of autonomous driving technology, it has advanced rapidly over the past decade. It is becoming increasingly likely that autonomous vehicles (AVs) would soon coexist with human-driven vehicles (HVs) on the roads. Currently, safety and reliable decision-making remain significant challenges, particularly when AVs are navigating lane changes and interacting with surrounding HVs. Therefore, precise estimation of the intentions of surrounding HVs can assist AVs in making more reliable and safe lane change decision-making. This involves not only understanding their current behaviors but also predicting their future motions without any direct communication. However, distinguishing between the passing and yielding intentions of surrounding HVs still remains ambiguous. To address the challenge, we propose a social intention estimation algorithm rooted in Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), coupled with a decision-making framework employing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms. To evaluate the method's performance, the proposed framework can be tested and applied in a lane-changing scenario within a simulated environment. Furthermore, the experiment results demonstrate how our approach enhances the ability of AVs to navigate lane changes safely and efficiently on roads.

CLIP-RLDrive: Human-Aligned Autonomous Driving via CLIP-Based Reward Shaping in Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents CLIP-RLDrive, a new reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for improving the decision-making of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in complex urban driving scenarios, particularly in unsignalized intersections. To achieve this goal, the decisions for AVs are aligned with human-like preferences through Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)-based reward shaping. One of the primary difficulties in RL scheme is designing a suitable reward model, which can often be challenging to achieve manually due to the complexity of the interactions and the driving scenarios. To deal with this issue, this paper leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs), particularly CLIP, to build an additional reward model based on visual and textual cues.