Pride and Prejudice: Toward an Information-Theoretic Framework for Mutually Communicative Driver Behavior Modeling

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Mixed autonomy driving becomes unsafe and inefficient when autonomous vehicles (AVs) and human-driven vehicles (HVs) misread each other's intentions. We study this problem as implicit mutual communication in lane changes. The proposed framework models how the ego vehicle both expresses its intent and probes the other driver's preference under epistemic uncertainty. It combines a level-k Bayesian persuasion game with virtual features for proactive signaling, information-theoretic rewards for mutual communication, and adaptive weights of communication affordances. We further introduce the Pride-Inquiry (P-I) and Pride-Prejudice (P-P) planes to analyze communication intensity and tendency. The model is calibrated with a Communication-Based Multi-Agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning algorithm (C-MIRL) on the naturalistic NGSIM dataset. Compared with the non-communicative baseline, the proposed model reduces the prediction error of mandatory lane changes by up to 20% while maintaining strong generalization. Driver-In-the-Loop questionnaire scores are positively correlated with the calibrated communication variables, supporting the subjective validity of the model. The learned rewards further show that inquiry and listening affordances contribute more than pride and expression alone, and that inquiry preference varies more strongly across drivers. These results support explicit modeling of mutual communication and epistemic uncertainty in interactive driving.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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