Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Safe Autonomous Driving Under Pedestrian Behavioral Uncertainty

arXiv:2605.20255v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Simulation-based testing of self-driving cars (SDCs) typically relies on scripted or simplified pedestrian models that do not capture the heterogeneity and uncertainty of real human crossing behavior. This limits the realism of safety assessments, especially in scenarios involving jaywalking, which is governed by latent personality traits that the vehicle cannot observe. We hypothesize that jointly training pedestrians and the SDC with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) produces more realistic interaction scenarios than training the SDC against fixed pedestrian policies, and that the resulting behavior gap between predictable and unpredictable crossings can be measured directly from trajectories. This paper describes a MARL environment in which an SDC and 12 pedestrians are co-trained using Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO). Pedestrian locomotion follows scripted Dijkstra pathfinding, while an RL policy controls high-level go/wait decisions. Jaywalking probability depends on a per-pedestrian personality trait sampled at episode start and hidden from the SDC. In 500-episode evaluations, the co-trained SDC reached 78% of goals with a 14% collision rate, compared to 35% goals and 33% collisions for the best rule-based baseline. A speed differential metric shows that the SDC traveled 2.65 m/s faster near jaywalkers than near crosswalk users at close range (0-3 m), indicating that jaywalking encounters were not anticipated. Jaywalking accounted for 13% of crossing events but was associated with 62% of collisions. Co-training with MARL pedestrians reduced collisions by 30% relative to single-agent RL, as pedestrians learned to wait when the SDC approached at speed.