CHARMS: A Cognitive Hierarchical Agent for Reasoning and Motion Stylization in Autonomous Driving

To address the challenge of insufficient interactivity and behavioral diversity in autonomous driving decision-making, this paper proposes a Cognitive Hierarchical Agent for Reasoning and Motion Stylization (CHARMS). By leveraging Level-k game theory, CHARMS captures human-like reasoning patterns through a two-stage training pipeline comprising reinforcement learning pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. This enables the resulting models to exhibit diverse and human-like behaviors, enhancing their decision-making capacity and interaction fidelity in complex traffic environments. Building upon this capability, we further develop a scenario generation framework that utilizes the Poisson cognitive hierarchy theory to control the distribution of vehicles with different driving styles through Poisson and binomial sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that CHARMS is capable of both making intelligent driving decisions as an ego vehicle and generating diverse, realistic driving scenarios as environment vehicles. The code for CHARMS is released at https://github.com/chuduanfeng/CHARMS.