Human-Guided Continual Learning for Personalized Decision-Making of Autonomous Driving

Learning-based techniques hold considerable promise in achieving human-like autonomous driving. However, one deployed policy encounters difficulties in satisfying the drivers’ diverse decision-making preferences simultaneously. Meanwhile, training personalized policies for each driver from scratch is time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a human-guided continual learning framework, wherein the human drivers could real-time take over a deployed policy when it performs unsatisfactorily, and the autonomous vehicle (AV) agent would automatically acquire human demonstrations and dynamically alter itself in accordance with personalized decision-making preference. Furthermore, a priority experience memory-enabled elastic weight consolidation (PEM-EWC) mechanism is developed to prevent the AV agent from overfitting to a limited number of human demonstrations and catastrophically forgetting its acquired fundamental driving abilities. Driver-in-the-loop simulations and real-world experiments are conducted in representative autonomous driving decision-making scenarios, and experimental results demonstrate the superior equilibrium of our proposed approach in terms of driving safety, human likeness, and training efficiency, compared to other baselines, which suggests that it provides a promising solution for personalized decision-making in autonomous driving. The supplementary video is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://youtu.be/HKF0ayxMycc</uri>.