Offline Reinforcement Learning using Human-Aligned Reward Labeling for Autonomous Emergency Braking in Occluded Pedestrian Crossing

Effective leveraging of real-world driving datasets is crucial for enhancing the training of autonomous driving systems. While Offline Reinforcement Learning enables training autonomous vehicles with such data, most available datasets lack meaningful reward labels. Reward labeling is essential as it provides feedback for the learning algorithm to distinguish between desirable and undesirable behaviors, thereby improving policy performance. This paper presents a novel approach for generating human-aligned reward labels. The proposed approach addresses the challenge of absent reward signals in the real-world datasets by generating labels that reflect human judgment and safety considerations. The reward function incorporates an adaptive safety component that is activated by analyzing semantic segmentation maps, enabling the autonomous vehicle to prioritize safety over efficiency in potential collision scenarios. The proposed method is applied to an occluded pedestrian crossing scenario with varying pedestrian traffic levels, using simulation data. When the generated rewards were used to train various Offline Reinforcement Learning algorithms, each model produced a meaningful policy, demonstrating the method's viability. In addition, the method was applied to a subset of the Audi Autonomous Driving Dataset, and the reward labels were compared to human-annotated reward labels. The findings show a moderate disparity between the two reward sets, and, most interestingly, the method flagged unsafe states that the human annotator missed.