Uncovering Interpretable Internal States of Merging Tasks at Highway On-Ramps for Autonomous Driving Decision-Making

Humans make daily-routine decisions based on their internal states in intricate interaction scenarios. This paper presents a probabilistically reconstructive learning approach to identify the internal states of multi-vehicle sequential interactions when merging at highway on-ramps. We treated the merging task's sequential decision as a dynamic, stochastic process and then integrated the internal states into an HMM-GMR model, a probabilistic combination of an extended Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) and hidden Markov models (HMM). We also developed a variant expectation-maximum (EM) algorithm to estimate the model parameters and verified them based on a real-world data set. Experimental results reveal that the interactive merge procedure at highway on-ramps can be semantically described by three interpretable internal states. This finding provides a basis for autonomous vehicles to develop a model-based decision-making algorithm in a partially observable environment.