arXiv Machine Learning

Flow-ERD: Agent-type Aware Flow Matching With Entropy-Regularized Distillation for Diverse Traffic Simulation

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Flow Matching Policy Optimization with Mirror Descent and Entropy Constraints

The paper introduces Flow Matching Policy Optimization with Mirror Descent and Entropy Constraints (FMER), a reinforcement learning framework that uses ODE-based flow matching to overcome limitations of SDE-based diffusion policies. FMER derives an analytic entropy objective to correct density distortion from a tanh transformation, establishes that minimizing an advantage-weighted conditional flow matching loss serves as a simulation-free surrogate for policy mirror descent, and dynamically tunes the mirror descent temperature to enforce a robust trust region. Experiments show FMER outperforms baselines on the sparse-reward FrankaKitchen task while remaining competitive on dense-reward MuJoCo benchmarks.

By Ting Gao, Stavros Orfanoudakis, Nan Lin, Winnie Daamen, Serge Hoogendoorn, Elvin Isufi
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

TerraTransfer++: Demonstration-Free End-to-End Planner

TerraTransfer++ demonstrates a demonstration‑free, end‑to‑end autonomous driving framework that leverages self‑play in vectorized simulators to pretrain a policy. The method distills self‑play rollouts into a flow‑matching trajectory teacher and trains lightweight adapters on a frozen vision backbone, using action KL divergence, a batch‑relational low‑rank loss, and trajectory‑matching loss. The resulting closed‑loop policy surpasses all published imitation‑based methods on the HUGSim benchmark, while the planner achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on NAVSIM navhard and navtest without any human demonstrations.

By Zikang Xiong, Weixin Li, Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Saarth Bonde, Grantland Hall, Chen Tang, Yihan Hu, Wei Zhan
arXiv AI
Oct 16

SHRED: Self-Play for Heterogeneous Road-Users without Expert Demonstrations

SHRED is a framework that trains vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists through large‑scale heterogeneous self‑play from random initialization, without using expert demonstrations or logged trajectories. By combining type‑specific dynamics, procedural scenario generation, and per‑agent randomization, SHRED allows diverse, realistic behaviors to emerge through closed‑loop interaction. In benchmarks such as the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge and InterPlan, SHRED outperforms demonstration‑free baselines and prior self‑play methods, showing that heterogeneity in self‑play improves both traffic realism and planning performance.

By Wei-Jer Chang, Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Weixin Li, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan