Learning from Shared-Control Overrides: Context-Driven Acceleration Profile Prediction for Personalized Overtaking

Abstract

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems are typically calibrated for an average driver, often resulting in a mismatch between vehicle behavior and individual expectations during time-critical maneuvers such as highway overtaking. When the ACC is perceived as too conservative and inconsistent, drivers intervene through throttle overrides, providing implicit feedback on the system's behavior. This paper reframes these override actions as human-in-theloop supervisory signals and proposes a data-driven framework for personalized vehicle adaptation, termed Context-driven Personalized ACC (CoP-ACC). Rather than relying solely on end-to-end regression, which tends to over-smooth dynamic responses, we introduce a hybrid pipeline combining: (i) unsupervised hierarchical clustering to extract representative acceleration profiles from override events; (ii) a context classifier that maps pre-maneuver driving conditions to the appropriate profile; and (iii) a residual regressor that refines the selected profile into a smooth, personalized acceleration profile tailored to the immediate context. Evaluated on real-world public-road data against a withheld forced-ACC baseline, the approach demonstrates high reconstruction fidelity and generates acceleration profiles that tend toward the driver's expected behavior in potential override contexts. The results highlight the potential of learning from shared-control overrides to enable anticipatory, personalized ACC behavior, reducing manual interventions and improving ride comfort.