Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Adaptable Personalized Autonomous Driving
This addresses the need for personalized autonomous driving to enhance user trust and satisfaction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing MORL methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of adapting autonomous vehicles to individual driving style preferences by proposing a multi-objective reinforcement learning approach with preference-driven optimization, enabling runtime adaptation without policy retraining and demonstrating dynamic behavior adjustment in simulated urban environments while maintaining collision avoidance and route completion.
Human drivers exhibit individual preferences regarding driving style. Adapting autonomous vehicles to these preferences is essential for user trust and satisfaction. However, existing end-to-end driving approaches often rely on predefined driving styles or require continuous user feedback for adaptation, limiting their ability to support dynamic, context-dependent preferences. We propose a novel approach using multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with preference-driven optimization for end-to-end autonomous driving that enables runtime adaptation to driving style preferences. Preferences are encoded as continuous weight vectors to modulate behavior along interpretable style objectives$\unicode{x2013}$including efficiency, comfort, speed, and aggressiveness$\unicode{x2013}$without requiring policy retraining. Our single-policy agent integrates vision-based perception in complex mixed-traffic scenarios and is evaluated in diverse urban environments using the CARLA simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that the agent dynamically adapts its driving behavior according to changing preferences while maintaining performance in terms of collision avoidance and route completion.