Cross-cultural Deployment of Autonomous Vehicles Using Data-light Inverse Reinforcement Learning

More than the adherence to specific traffic regulations, driving culture touches upon a more implicit part - an informal, conventional, collective behavioral pattern followed by drivers - that varies across countries, regions, and even cities. Such cultural divergence has become one of the biggest challenges in deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) across diverse regions today. The current emergence of data-driven methods has shown a potential solution to enable culture-compatible driving through learning from data, but what if some underdeveloped regions cannot provide sufficient local data to inform driving culture? This issue is particularly significant for a broader global AV market. Here, we propose a cross-cultural deployment scheme for AVs, called data-light inverse reinforcement learning, designed to re-calibrate culture-specific AVs and assimilate them into other cultures. First, we report the divergence in driving cultures through a comprehensive comparative analysis of naturalistic driving datasets on highways from three countries: Germany, China, and the USA. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme by testing the expeditious cross-cultural deployment across these three countries, with cumulative testing mileage of over 56084 km. The performance is particularly advantageous when cross-cultural deployment is carried out without affluent local data. Results show that we can reduce the dependence on local data by a margin of 98.67% at best. This study is expected to bring a broader, fairer AV global market, particularly in those regions that lack enough local data to develop culture-compatible AVs.