Hybrid Action-Based Reinforcement Learning for Multiobjective Compatible Autonomous Driving

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown excellent performance in solving decision-making and control problems of autonomous driving (AD), which is increasingly applied in diverse driving scenarios. However, driving is a multiattribute problem, leading to challenges in achieving multiobjective compatibility for current RL methods, especially in both policy updating and policy execution. On the one hand, a single value evaluation network limits the policy updating in complex scenarios with coupled driving objectives. On the other hand, the common single-type action space structure limits driving flexibility or results in large behavior fluctuations during policy execution. To this end, we propose a multiobjective ensemble-critic (MoEC) RL method with a hybrid parametrized action for multiobjective compatible AD. Specifically, an advanced MORL architecture is constructed, in which the ensemble-critic focuses on different objectives through independent reward functions. The architecture integrates a hybrid parameterized action space structure, and the generated driving actions contain both abstract guidance that matches the hybrid road modality and concrete control commands. In addition, an uncertainty-based exploration mechanism that supports hybrid actions is developed to learn multiobjective compatible policies more quickly. The experimental results demonstrate that, in both simulator-based and HighD dataset-based multilane highway scenarios, our method efficiently learns multiobjective compatible AD with respect to efficiency, action consistency, and safety.