# Cooperative Decision-Making for CAVs at Unsignalized Intersections: A MARL Approach with Attention and Hierarchical Game Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05712/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2024.

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

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-Agent Cooperative Decision-Making: Scenarios, Approaches, Challenges and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13415/) (2025)
- [Towards Interactive and Learnable Cooperative Driving Automation: a Large Language Model-Driven Decision-Making Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12812/) (2024)
- [Language-Driven Policy Distillation for Cooperative Driving in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24152/) (2024)
- [TeLL-Drive: Enhancing Autonomous Driving with Teacher LLM-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01387/) (2025)
- [CoLMDriver: LLM-based Negotiation Benefits Cooperative Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08683/) (2025)
- [LeAD: The LLM Enhanced Planning System Converged with End-to-end Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05754/) (2025)
- [Towards Fault Tolerance in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00534/) (2024)
- [A Differentiated Reward Method for Reinforcement Learning based Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Decision-Making Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00352/) (2025)
- [Deep Fictitious Play-Based Potential Differential Games for Learning Human-Like Interaction at Unsignalized Intersections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12283/) (2025)
- [Are LLMs The Way Forward? A Case Study on LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Decentralized Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12751/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model based Interactive Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23513/) (2026)
- [Compact Latent Coordination for Autonomous Vehicles at Unsignalized Intersections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21488/) (2026)
- [How Roadside Units Enhance Intersection Safety? Cooperative Autonomous Driving System Design and A Proof of Concept](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09144/) (2026)
- [CoLMIN: LLM-based Multi-Decision Path Negotiation for Cooperative Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04807/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The development of autonomous vehicles has shown great potential to enhance the efficiency and safety of transportation systems. However, the decision-making issue in complex human-machine mixed traffic scenarios, such as unsignalized intersections, remains a challenge for autonomous vehicles. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to solve complex decision-making problems, existing RL methods still have limitations in dealing with cooperative decision-making of multiple connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), ensuring safety during exploration, and simulating realistic human driver behaviors. In this paper, a novel and efficient algorithm, Multi-Agent Game-prior Attention Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MA-GA-DDPG), is proposed to address these limitations. Our proposed algorithm formulates the decision-making problem of CAVs at unsignalized intersections as a decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning problem and incorporates an attention mechanism to capture interaction dependencies between ego CAV and other agents. The attention weights between the ego vehicle and other agents are then used to screen interaction objects and obtain prior hierarchical game relations, based on which a safety inspector module is designed to improve the traffic safety. Furthermore, both simulation and hardware-in-the-loop experiments were conducted, demonstrating that our method outperforms other baseline approaches in terms of driving safety, efficiency, and comfort.