# Courteous Autonomous Cars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.02633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02633/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Efficient Sampling-Based Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Application to Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13704/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic Prediction of Interactive Driving Behavior via Hierarchical Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02926/) (2018)
- [Transferable and Adaptable Driving Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05140/) (2022)
- [Deep Structured Reactive Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06832/) (2021)
- [Editing Driver Character: Socially-Controllable Behavior Generation for Interactive Traffic Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13830/) (2023)
- [Learning Human Rewards by Inferring Their Latent Intelligence Levels in Multi-Agent Games: A Theory-of-Mind Approach with Application to Driving Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04289/) (2021)
- [EditFollower: Tunable Car Following Models for Customizable Adaptive Cruise Control Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02516/) (2024)
- [Learning responsibility allocations for multi-agent interactions: A differentiable optimization approach with control barrier functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07409/) (2024)
- [Anticipatory Planning: Improving Long-Lived Planning by Estimating Expected Cost of Future Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04692/) (2023)
- [Calibration of Human Driving Behavior and Preference Using Naturalistic Traffic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01820/) (2021)
- [A Two-stage Based Social Preference Recognition in Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03303/) (2023)
- [Mathematical Models of Human Drivers Using Artificial Risk Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12722/) (2022)
- [Does Unpredictability Influence Driving Behavior?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15287/) (2023)
- [Towards Developing Socially Compliant Automated Vehicles: Advances, Expert Insights, and A Conceptual Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06089/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Typically, autonomous cars optimize for a combination of safety, efficiency, and driving quality. But as we get better at this optimization, we start seeing behavior go from too conservative to too aggressive. The car's behavior exposes the incentives we provide in its cost function. In this work, we argue for cars that are not optimizing a purely selfish cost, but also try to be courteous to other interactive drivers. We formalize courtesy as a term in the objective that measures the increase in another driver's cost induced by the autonomous car's behavior. Such a courtesy term enables the robot car to be aware of possible irrationality of the human behavior, and plan accordingly. We analyze the effect of courtesy in a variety of scenarios. We find, for example, that courteous robot cars leave more space when merging in front of a human driver. Moreover, we find that such a courtesy term can help explain real human driver behavior on the NGSIM dataset.