Joint Imitation Learning of Behavior Decision and Control for Autonomous Intersection Navigation

Modern autonomous driving systems face substantial challenges when navigating dense intersections due to the high uncertainty introduced by other road users. Due to the complexity of the task, the autonomous vehicle needs to generate policies at multiple levels of abstraction. However, previous deep imitation learning methods focused on learning control policies while using simple rule-based behavior models. To bridge this gap and achieve human-like driving, we develop a hierarchy of high-level behavior decision and low-level control, where both policies are jointly learned from human demonstrations based on imitation learning. Over 60 hours of driving data from 10 drivers at six intersections was collected. The proposed method is extensively evaluated in challenging intersection scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate the method's superior performance over baselines in terms of task completion and control quality. We demonstrate the importance of learning human-like behavior decisions as well as joint learning of behavior and control policies. The capability of imitating different driving styles is also illustrated.