Deep Attention Driven Reinforcement Learning (DAD-RL) for Autonomous Decision-Making in Dynamic Environment

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) decision-making in ur-ban environments is inherently challenging due to the dynamic interactions with surrounding vehicles. For safe planning, AV/ego must understand the weightage of various spatiotemporal interactions in a scene. Contemporary works use colos-sal transformer architectures to encode interactions mainly for trajectory prediction, resulting in increased computational complexity. To address this issue without compromising spatiotemporal understanding and performance, we propose the simple Deep Attention Driven Reinforcement Learning (DAD-RL) framework, which dynamically assigns and incorporates the significance of surrounding vehicles into the ego's RL-driven decision-making process. We introduce an AV-centric spatiotemporal attention encoding (STAE) mechanism for learning the dynamic interactions with different surrounding vehicles. To understand map and route context, we employ a context encoder to extract features from context maps. The spatiotemporal representations combined with contextual encoding provide a comprehensive state representation. The resulting model is trained using the Soft-Actor Critic (SAC) algorithm. We evaluate the proposed framework on the SMARTS urban benchmarking scenarios without traffic signals to demonstrate that DAD-RL outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, an ablation study underscores the importance of the context-encoder and spatiotemporal attention encoder in achieving superior performance.