Conditional Predictive Behavior Planning with Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Human-like Autonomous Driving

Making safe and human-like decisions is an essential capability of autonomous driving systems and learning-based behavior planning is a promising pathway toward this objective. Distinguished from existing learning-based methods that directly output decisions, this work introduces a predictive behavior planning framework that learns to predict and evaluate from human driving data. Concretely, a behavior generation module first produces a diverse set of candidate behaviors in the form of trajectory proposals. Then the proposed conditional motion prediction network is employed to forecast other agents' future trajectories conditioned on each trajectory proposal. Given the candidate plans and associated prediction results, we learn a scoring module to evaluate the plans using maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). We conduct comprehensive experiments to validate the proposed framework on a large-scale real-world urban driving dataset. The results reveal that the conditional prediction model is able to forecast multiple possible future trajectories given a candidate behavior and the prediction results are reactive to different plans. Moreover, the IRL-based scoring module can properly evaluate the trajectory proposals and select close-to-human ones. The proposed framework outperforms other baseline methods in terms of similarity to human driving trajectories. Moreover, we find that the conditional prediction model can improve both prediction and planning performance compared to the non-conditional model, and learning the scoring module is critical to correctly evaluating the candidate plans to align with human drivers.