Risk-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Group Opinion for Autonomous Driving

To avoid dangerous situations, such as collisions in dynamic environments, autonomous vehicles must predict the risks of the current scene to take safe actions. Traditional rule-based risk prediction methods and existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, which typically rely on manually designed driving decision rules or heuristic reward functions, often fail to capture the complexity of real-world dangerous scenarios, leading to suboptimal and unsafe driving decisions. To address this limitation, we develop a novel RL method, called Group Opinion Risk-Aware Reinforcement Learning (GORA-RL), for safer driving decisions that align with real-world conditions. Specifically, we first introduce surveys of human drivers to assess risk in real-world driving situations. Using these real group opinions as training data, we train a risk prediction model, referred to as the risk prediction model with a Transformer (RPT), that captures the crucial characteristics of these scenarios, resulting in more realistic and reliable risk predictions. This model is then integrated as a reward function to train an RL algorithm for making driving decisions in various scenarios. The experiments validate that our approach outperforms two state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in challenging congested scenarios, such as merging and intersections, in terms of reward and several other metrics. Project site: https://github.com/naiyisiji/RPT. ©2025 IEEE