The paper studies how Bird's‑Eye‑View (BEV) maps predicted by Cross‑View Transformers (CVT) can be used directly as inputs to a Behavior‑Cloning (BC) driving policy in the CARLA simulator. It introduces a six‑channel BEV representation and a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) weighting scheme to focus learning on underrepresented maneuvers. Closed‑loop tests show that the KDE‑weighted model is the only predicted‑BEV agent to finish an episode without infractions, highlighting that global segmentation scores are poor proxies for driving performance and that prediction quality at critical geometries, especially the route channel, is key to reliable navigation.
By Felipe Carlos dos Santos, Eric Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto
The paper presents a compact multimodal policy trained via behavioral cloning to drive autonomously in the CARLA simulator. Using five‑frame histories of RGB images, LiDAR, telemetry, and lane waypoints, the 1.36‑million‑parameter model predicts throttle, brake, and steering at 20 Hz. Trained on 236,882 windows (≈3.3 hours of driving) from 448 captures, the policy drives for hours on both training and unseen routes without collisions, demonstrating qualitative transfer and recovery from large trajectory deviations.
By Jordy Kieto
arXiv:2307. 06647v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DeepIPCv2, an end-to-end autonomous driving framework that integrates LiDAR-based environmental perception with command-specific control learning.
By Oskar Natan, Jun Miura
Diffusion-2BC is a hybrid training method that combines a diffusion denoising objective with an auxiliary deterministic behavior‑cloning loss over a shared visual encoder. The auxiliary loss is used only during training, while inference remains diffusion‑based. Experiments on the Claw environment and CARLA navigation show that Diffusion‑2BC reduces mean mask‑distance error by about 10% compared to a diffusion baseline and by 85% compared to standard deterministic behavior cloning, and it enables the agent to travel farther and exhibit multimodal route choices.
By Bruno Maciel Machado, Eric Aislan Antonelo
MILER is an end‑to‑end reinforcement learning framework that achieves zero‑shot sim‑to‑real transfer for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. It uses a custom semantic mid‑level representation (MLR) simulator for offline training, and during deployment it processes real camera and LiDAR data with BEVFusion to produce a compatible bird’s‑eye‑view representation. The policy’s actions are applied via a trajectory‑alignment strategy, allowing the system to drive 17.3 km on a 3.0 km test track without human intervention, all running on a Jetson AGX Orin.
By Thomas Steinecker, Denis Trescher, Alexander Bienemann, Thorsten Luettel, Mirko Maehlisch
End-to-end models that map multimodal inputs directly to future trajectories/maneuvers have emerged as an increasingly prominent research paradigm in autonomous driving. This class of models includes both Vision-Language-Action models and trajectory-generative planners.
arXiv:2603. 18315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on manually engineered rewards or sparse collision signals, which fail to capture the rich contextual understanding required for safe driving and make unsafe exploration unavoidable in real-world settings.
By Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Zhengyang Wan, Yansong Qu, Junwei You, Sicong Jiang, Sikai Chen
arXiv:2609.36934v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Traffic signal control (TSC) is essential for improving urban mobility and reducing congestion. Although roadside cameras are widely deployed at signal...
By Pan Zhang, Siqi Lai, Kemu Dong, Hao Liu
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:2608. 12198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent research in machine and deep learning has shown the potential of learningbased motion planning approaches to improve the driving behavior of automated vehicles, especially in complex environments.
By Jean-Pierre Busch, Guido Linden, Jan Bergmann, Lutz Eckstein
The paper introduces a low‑cost, open experimental platform for end‑to‑end autonomous driving on miniature Ackermann vehicles, combining a physical car, printed track, data collection tools, trajectory registration, and a Webots digital twin. It implements command‑conditioned behavior cloning, achieving a mean cross‑track error of 6.1 cm on the real vehicle and demonstrating the impact of camera field of view in simulation. Using synthetic data from the digital twin and a sim‑to‑real image translator, a higher‑capacity policy trained on both synthetic and real data completes all four track routes, outperforming the baseline trained only on real data.
By Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gabriel George Zipperer
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