Safe Reinforcement Learning with Mixture Density Network: A Case Study in Autonomous Highway Driving

Abstract: This paper presents a safe reinforcement learning system for automated driving that benefits from multimodal future trajectory predictions. We propose a safety system that consists of two safety components: a heuristic safety and a learning-based safety. The heuristic safety module is based on common driving rules. On the other hand, the learning-based safety module is a data-driven safety rule that learns safety patterns from driving data. Specifically, it utilizes mixture density recurrent neural networks (MD-RNN) for multimodal future trajectory predictions to accelerate the learning progress. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed safety system outperforms previously reported results in terms of average reward and number of collisions.