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.
arXiv:2606. 19370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-play reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a way to train driving policies without any human data.
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.
arXiv:2506. 12283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modeling vehicle interactions at unsignalized intersections is a challenging task due to the complexity of the underlying game-theoretic processes.
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.
The paper introduces a plug‑and‑play method that injects traffic‑element signals—such as traffic lights and road signs—into end‑to‑end autonomous driving models with minimal architectural changes. By augmenting several public datasets with comprehensive traffic‑element annotations, the authors evaluate this integration across diverse driving paradigms, consistently improving performance on nuScenes, NAVSIM‑v1, NAVSIM‑v2, and Bench2Drive. The approach achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art result on the challenging NAVSIM‑v2 benchmark, demonstrating the broad utility of traffic‑element awareness.
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.
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:2510. 12560v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models trained with imitation learning (IL) often generalize poorly, particularly in long-tail scenarios where expert demonstrations are sparse.
arXiv:2608. 14332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning is promising for autonomous urban driving, but long-horizon goal-directed navigation asks a policy to acquire several competing behaviors at once--reaching a distant goal, tracking a route, avoiding obstacles, obeying signals--and a fixed objective gives no order in which to learn them.
arXiv:2606. 17362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent.
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...
The paper explores Behavior Cloning (BC) for autonomous driving using bird's‑eye view (BEV) inputs in simulated urban settings. It introduces a weighted BC approach that employs a kernel density estimator to adjust training sample weights, emphasizing rare but critical actions like stopping at red lights and accelerating at green lights. Experiments in the CARLA simulator show that this weighted method improves route completion and generalizes better to unseen test environments compared to standard BC.