arXiv AI

Collective Autonomous Vehicle Routing Needs Social Awareness for Coexistence with Human Drivers

The paper proposes adding a social component—marginal cost—to autonomous vehicle (AV) routing rewards to account for the impact of AVs on human-driven vehicles (HDVs). Using multi-agent reinforcement learning on real-world networks, the authors show that this social reward reduces HDV travel time increases and improves overall system performance compared to purely selfish AV routing. A scalable approach limits counterfactual simulations to the most influential AVs, maintaining performance while cutting computational cost.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning with Representative Agents for Traffic Modeling

The paper proposes a scalable traffic modeling approach that uses a single representative large language model (LLM) agent for each homogeneous traveler group, rather than one LLM per traveler. The representative agent maintains a mixed strategy over routes, updates it daily based on positive reinforcement signals, and uses a tunable step size to adjust its strategy. This design improves scalability, stabilizes learning, and produces interpretable dynamics that reproduce realistic behavioral patterns such as the decoy effect and income‑based willingness‑to‑pay differences.

By Hanlin Sun, Jiayang Li
arXiv AI
Jul 15

TerraZero: Procedural Driving Simulation for Zero-Demonstration Self-Play at Scale

arXiv:2607. 13028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training robust autonomous driving agents requires a simulator that is fast enough for reinforcement learning at scale, realistic enough to ground behavior in real-world map structure, and diverse enough to cover the safety-critical long tail that logged data rarely contains.

By Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Weixin Li, Wei-Jer Chang, Zachary Lee, Tim Wang, Wei Zhan
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Learn2Drive: A neural network-based framework for socially compliant automated vehicle control

The paper presents Learn2Drive, a neural‑network‑based framework for socially compliant adaptive cruise control in automated vehicles. It incorporates social value orientation to let AVs consider their impact on human‑driven vehicles and overall traffic flow, aiming to reduce congestion and improve efficiency. Numerical experiments show that shifting the AV’s objective from personal energy savings to collective traffic flow can boost downstream vehicle speeds by over 38% and dampen traffic oscillations.

By Yuhui Liu, Samannita Halder, Shian Wang, Tianyi Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

RideSkill: A Hierarchical Algorithm for Generalized Ride Sharing with LLM-Driven Automatic Evolution

RideSkill is a hierarchical algorithm for generalized ride sharing that uses large language models (LLMs) to automatically design and train a skill repository, a combiner, and a repositioner. The combiner assigns vehicle-specific skills for adaptive dispatch across varying scenarios and objectives, while the repositioner moves idle vehicles to emerging regions to avoid conflicts. By training all components via an LLM-based evolutionary method, RideSkill eliminates the need for real-time LLM calls, enabling high-performance deployment in large-scale systems.

By Zijian Zhao, Sen Li, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for V2X Resource Allocation: Disentangling MARL Challenges Through Benchmarking

arXiv:2603. 06607v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Radio resource allocation (RRA) is a critical function in cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) networks, where vehicles must share limited wireless resources to support safety-critical communications.

By Siyuan Wang, Lei Lei, Pranav Maheshwari, Sam Bellefeuille, Kan Zheng
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

What Emerges and What Breaks in Self-Play Driving

The paper reports on training autonomous driving policies via self‑play, extending previous work by using Transformers and a real‑city high‑definition map. On CARLA and Waymo benchmarks, the resulting policies underperform compared to Gigaflow, with identified failure modes such as reward hacking at traffic lights and lack of incentive to stop at stop signs. The authors also analyze which traffic rules emerge from self‑play and confirm that reward conditioning produces diverse driving behaviors.

By Laur Sisask, Ardi Tampuu, Tambet Matiisen
arXiv AI
3d ago

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
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Preference-Conditioned Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Tactical Decision Making in Heavy-Duty Vehicles

The paper introduces a preference-conditioned multi-objective reinforcement learning framework for tactical decision making in heavy-duty vehicles. It explicitly models safety, energy efficiency, and time efficiency as separate objectives and uses Generalized Policy Improvement and Proximal Policy Optimization to learn policies that approximate the Pareto front across these conflicting goals. Experiments in a scalable highway traffic simulation show smooth, interpretable Pareto fronts and meaningful trade-offs, with the policy enabling behavior transitions without retraining.

By Deepthi Pathare, Leo Laine, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani