The paper introduces Interval POMDP Shielding for agents with imperfect perception, aiming to prevent unsafe actions when sensor readings may be misclassified. By estimating perception uncertainty from finite labeled data, the authors construct confidence intervals and model the system as a finite Interval Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. They propose an algorithm that computes a conservative belief set, enabling a runtime shield that guarantees, with high probability, that any action allowed by the shield meets a specified safety lower bound. Experiments on four case studies demonstrate that this shielding approach outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in safety.
By William Scarbro, Ravi Mangal
arXiv:2608. 10403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising performance in autonomous driving, yet ensuring the safety of online RL policies remains challenging due to insufficient exposure to safety-critical driving scenes.
By Xincong Hu (Nanjing University), Lei Ou (Nanjing University), Maosen Li (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Jingtao Zhang (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Liguo Hou (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Zongzhang Zhang (Nanjing University)
arXiv:2607. 01794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid development of autonomous aerial systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as inspection, environmental monitoring, and rescue, creating growing demand for reliable autonomous navigation.
By Shenghui Zhang, YuXuan Gao, Songwei Zhao, Jifeng Hu, Zijing Zhang, Hechang Chen
The paper evaluates five vision‑language models on autonomous driving tasks under various visual input conditions, finding that visual corruption affects accuracy and confidence differently across models and datasets. It then tests Visual Evidence Augmentation (VEA) as an inference‑time technique to enhance reliability, observing mixed improvements depending on the model and setting.
By Manasa Mariam Mammen, Priyanka Mary Mammen, Zafer Kayatas, Stefan Wagner
arXiv:2211.04340v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Autonomous driving systems must be capable of making quick decisions based on the perceived environment and specific driving conditions. Perception...
By Markus K\"angsepp, Meelis Kull
arXiv:2510. 03314v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring the safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists, remains a critical challenge, as conventional infrastructure-based measures are often insufficient in dynamic urban environments.
By Shucheng Zhang, Yan Shi, Bingzhang Wang, Yuang Zhang, Muhammad Monjurul Karim, Kehua Chen, Chenxi Liu, Mehrdad Nasri, Yinhai Wang
arXiv:2408. 12548v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) has become central to Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), supporting perception, prediction, planning, control, and decision-making in dynamic environments.
By Yousef Emami, Mohammadhossein Homaei, Miguel Guti\'errez Gait\'an, Luis Almeida, Kai Li, Hui Huang, Zhu Han
arXiv:2605. 21446v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpretable autonomous driving planners depend not only on generating explanations, but also on those explanations remaining reliable under real-world sensor degradation.
By Abhinaw Priyadershi, Jelena Frtunikj
OPTED is a method for on‑policy fine‑tuning of end‑to‑end driving models that separates reinforcement learning from the policy update. A privileged teacher trained with RL on vectorized inputs (HD‑maps and bounding boxes) supervises the pre‑trained student during closed‑loop post‑training. Applied to the camera‑based models TransFuser and VaVAM in AlpaSim, OPTED boosts driving scores by 1.6× and 9.5×, respectively, while requiring roughly three orders of magnitude fewer simulator interactions than direct RL post‑training.
By Damiano Da Col, Maximilian Igl, Peter Karkus, Kashyap Chitta, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Konrad Schindler, Christos Sakaridis
arXiv:2606. 00090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical AI systems increasingly map multimodal observations, language instructions, and learned world representations into physically consequential actions.
By Barak Or
arXiv:2606. 02562v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous robots that interact with people must make safe and efficient decisions under human-induced uncertainty, such as their preferences, goals, competency, and willingness to cooperate.
By Haimin Hu
arXiv:2607. 21646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ensuring safety in reinforcement learning under nonstationarity requires determining whether a learning system can safely adapt to forecasted environmental change within the required recovery horizon.
By Timothy Tomashevskiy