Elements of Effective Deep Reinforcement Learning towards Tactical Driving Decision Making

Tactical driving decision making is crucial for autonomous driving systems and has attracted considerable interest in recent years. In this paper, we propose several practical components that can speed up deep reinforcement learning algorithms towards tactical decision making tasks: 1) nonuniform action skipping as a more stable alternative to action-repetition frame skipping, 2) a counterbased penalty for lanes on which ego vehicle has less right-of-road, and 3) heuristic inference-time action masking for apparently undesirable actions. We evaluate the proposed components in a realistic driving simulator and compare them with several baselines. Results show that the proposed scheme provides superior performance in terms of safety, efficiency, and comfort.