Welcome to Francis Academic Press

Academic Journal of Computing & Information Science, 2026, 9(9); doi: 10.25236/AJCIS.2026.090905.

Driving Behavior Modeling of Human Drivers on Highways Based on Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Non-Cooperative Game Theory

Author(s)

Qiyue Chang

Corresponding Author:
Qiyue Chang
Affiliation(s)

School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 611756, China

Abstract

Deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) in mixed traffic requires a background traffic environment that reproduces the variability and uncertainty of human driving. This paper proposes MIG, a hierarchical highway human driving behavior model combining Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning (MEDIRL) with non-cooperative game theory. Surrounding traffic is organized into three layers: the outer layer replays real trajectory data; the inner layer re-drives vehicles disturbed by the ego vehicle with a MEDIRL model whose nonlinear reward is a deep neural network, avoiding manual feature engineering; and the game layer selects the highest-risk neighbor and resolves the interaction as a Nash equilibrium. Trained and validated on NGSIM US-101 in a purpose-built environment (ngsim_env), MIG converges stably, generates game trajectories close to the real ones, and reproduces the speed and acceleration distributions of real traffic more faithfully than the IDM+MOBIL and IRL baselines.

Keywords

Deep inverse reinforcement learning, Maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning, Game theory, Human driving behavior modeling

Cite This Paper

Qiyue Chang. Driving Behavior Modeling of Human Drivers on Highways Based on Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Non-Cooperative Game Theory. Academic Journal of Computing & Information Science (2026), Vol. 9, Issue 9: 31-39. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJCIS.2026.090905.

References

[1] Wang M, Zhang L, Wang Z, et al. A Real-Time Dynamic Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Driving Vehicles. 2019 3rd Conference on Vehicle Control and Intelligence (CVCI). Hefei, China: IEEE, 2019: 1-6.

[2] Feng S, Yan X, Sun H, et al. Intelligent Driving Intelligence Test for Autonomous Vehicles with Naturalistic and Adversarial Environment. Nature Communications, 2021, 12(1): 748.

[3] Nallaperuma D, De Silva D, Alahakoon D, et al. Intelligent Detection of Driver Behavior Changes for Effective Coordination Between Autonomous and Human Driven Vehicles. IECON 2018 - 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. Washington, DC: IEEE, 2018: 3120-3125.

[4] Kalra N, Paddock S M. Driving to Safety: How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2016, 94: 182-193.

[5] Treiber M, Hennecke A, Helbing D. Congested Traffic States in Empirical Observations and Microscopic Simulations. Physical Review E, 2000, 62(2): 1805-1824.

[6] Newell G F. A Simplified Car-Following Theory: A Lower Order Model. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2002, 36(3): 195-205.

[7] Gipps P G. A Behavioural Car-Following Model for Computer Simulation. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 1981, 15(2): 105-111.

[8] Kesting A, Treiber M, Helbing D. General Lane-Changing Model MOBIL for Car-Following Models. Transportation Research Record, 2007, 1999(1): 86-94.

[9] Ikotun A M, Ezugwu A E, Abualigah L, et al. K-means Clustering Algorithms: A Comprehensive Review, Variants Analysis, and Advances in the Era of Big Data. Information Sciences, 2023, 622: 178-210.

[10] Siami M, Naderpour M, Lu J. A Mobile Telematics Pattern Recognition Framework for Driving Behavior Extraction. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2021, 22(3): 1459-1472.

[11] Brown K, Driggs-Campbell K, Kochenderfer M J. A Taxonomy and Review of Algorithms for Modeling and Predicting Human Driver Behavior. arXiv preprint, 2020, arXiv:2006.12188.

[12] Li N, Oyler D W, Zhang M, et al. Game Theoretic Modeling of Driver and Vehicle Interactions for Verification and Validation of Autonomous Vehicle Control Systems. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 2018, 26(5): 1782-1797.

[13] Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton G E. ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Communications of the ACM, 2017, 60(6): 84-90.

[14] Hochreiter S, Schmidhuber J. Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Computation, 1997, 9(8): 1735-1780.

[15] Kebria P M, Khosravi A, Salaken S M, et al. Deep Imitation Learning for Autonomous Vehicles Based on Convolutional Neural Networks. IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, 2020, 7(1): 82-95.

[16] Georgakopoulos G F, Kavvadias D J, Sioutis L G. Nash Equilibria in All-Optical Networks. Discrete Mathematics, 2009, 309(13): 4332-4342.

[17] Xu C, Zhao W, Li L, et al. A Nash Q-Learning Based Motion Decision Algorithm with Considering Interaction to Traffic Participants. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2020, 69(11): 12621-12634.

[18] Zhu M, Wang X, Wang Y. Human-Like Autonomous Car-Following Model with Deep Reinforcement Learning. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2018, 97: 348-368.

[19] Wulfmeier M, Ondruska P, Posner I. Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning. arXiv preprint, 2016, arXiv:1507.04888.

[20] Huang Z, Wu J, Lv C. Driving Behavior Modeling Using Naturalistic Human Driving Data with Inverse Reinforcement Learning. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2022, 23(8): 10239-10251.

[21] Zhou Y, Fu R, Wang C. Learning the Car-Following Behavior of Drivers Using Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Journal of Advanced Transportation, 2020, 2020: 1-13.

[22] Abbeel P, Ng A Y. Apprenticeship Learning via Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML '04). Banff, Alberta, Canada: ACM Press, 2004: 1.

[23] Boularias A, Kober J, Peters J. Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS). 2011: 182-189.

[24] Ziebart B D, Maas A, Bagnell J A, et al. Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2008). Helsinki, Finland: ACM Press, 2008: 1433-1438.

[25] Road Traffic Safety Law of the People's Republic of China (2021 Revision). Beijing Traffic Administration. Available online: https://jtgl.beijing.gov.cn/jgj/jgxx/flfg/fl/205308/index.html (accessed on 13 May 2024).

[26] Schafer R. What Is a Savitzky-Golay Filter? [Lecture Notes]. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 2011, 28(4): 111-117.