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This paper introduces a quantum-inspired model for representing driver behavior that captures the complex, context-dependent, and evolving nature of driving patterns. By encoding each driver as an evolving density matrix, the model integrates behavioral uncertainty and temporal evolution, allowing for the identification of three distinct driving profiles: free flow, transition, and congestion. The approach not only aligns with established traffic phenomena but also enhances the interpretability and practical application of traffic models, providing real-time behavioral insights for autonomous vehicles.
A quantum-inspired model reveals three distinct driving profiles and offers real-time insights into driver behavior, enhancing both interpretability and practical application in traffic systems.
Driver behavior is heterogeneous, context-dependent, and changes over time, and these properties shape the traffic phenomena we observe. Most models, however, fix in advance which behavioral variables interact and how. Behavior outside that form is absorbed as noise, while models flexible enough to capture it tend to lose interpretability. We introduce a quantum-inspired representation of driver behavior that combines properties usually treated separately or in part: it is continuous, probabilistic, context-dependent, history-dependent, and represents interactions among behavioral variables as learned from data. Each driver is encoded as an evolving density matrix, providing a unified representation of behavioral uncertainty, temporal evolution, and context-dependent behavioral variation. Trained without supervision on the I-24 MOTION dataset, the framework recovers three interpretable driving profiles representing three regimes: free flow, transition, and congestion. The profiles capture the behavioral range of the data and the smooth transitions drivers make between regimes as conditions change. The same representation also reproduces known macroscopic phenomena, aligning with the fundamental diagram and reproducing hysteresis loops. We also show how the representation supports practical use: it supplies context-dependent parameters to classical car-following models, and gives an autonomous vehicle a live behavioral read of the surrounding drivers with a short-horizon forecast of their motion. The framework points toward models of traffic that are interpretable and trustworthy by construction. We release an open-source toolkit on GitHub (https://github.com/mselayan/quantum-driver-representation) spanning data processing, training, inference, and analysis.
