Interaction-Aware and Hierarchically-Explainable Heterogeneous Graph-based Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving Simulation

Mahan Tabatabaie, Suining He, Kang G. Shin

Abstract: Understanding and learning the actor-to-X inter-actions (AXIs), such as those between the focal vehicles (actor) and other traffic participants (e.g., other vehicles, pedestrians) as well as traffic environments (e.g., city/road map), is essential for the development of a decision-making model and simulation of autonomous driving (AD). Existing practices on imitation learning (IL) for AD simulation, despite the advances in the model learnability, have not accounted for fusing and differentiating the heterogeneous AXIs in complex road environments. Furthermore, how to further explain the hierarchical structures within the complex AXIs remains largely under-explored. To overcome these challenges, we propose HGIL, an interaction- aware and hierarchically-explainable Heterogeneous _Graph- based Imitation Learning approach for AD simulation. We have designed a novel heterogeneous interaction graph (HIG) to provide local and global representation as well as awareness of the AXIs. Integrating the HIG as the state embeddings, we have designed a hierarchically-explainable generative adversarial imitation learning approach, with local sub-graph and global cross-graph attention, to capture the interaction behaviors and driving decision-making processes. Our data-driven simulation and explanation studies have corroborated the accuracy and explainability of HGIL in learning and capturing the complex AXIs.