Human-Feedback-Guided Multi-Agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Interactive Driving Behavior Modeling

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Modeling human driving behavior is fundamental to understanding driver decision-making and supporting autonomous vehicles (AVs) in mixed traffic. Reward learning offers a principled way to infer the latent objectives behind driving behaviors, yet most existing methods are formulated in single-agent settings and treat surrounding vehicles as dynamic obstacles. Directly extending reward learning to multi-agent scenarios is difficult because the joint action space grows exponentially with the number of interacting vehicles. In addition, existing approaches mainly rely on physical demonstrations and rarely exploit human feedback during reward recovery. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Human-Feedback-Guided Multi-Agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning (HFG-MAIRL) framework for interactive driving behavior modeling. First, we develop a multi-agent maximum-entropy inverse reinforcement learning module that explicitly models each vehicle and its directly interacting neighbors in a localized Markov game, while using aggregated traffic states to capture the influence of the broader traffic environment. The resulting coupled multi-vehicle responses are approximated through finite marginal-response iterations over factorized vehicle-level policies, avoiding explicit enumeration of the full joint action space. Second, we incorporate human feedback as ordinal preference supervision through a Bradley-Terry likelihood. In our experiments, driver emotion labels are used as one instantiation of such feedback and converted into pairwise ordinal preference constraints. Experiments on the AIDE dataset show that HFG-MAIRL outperforms representative IRL baselines in decision modeling and produces interpretable feedback-aligned reward patterns.