arXiv Machine Learning

Reward as Observation: Learning Reward-Based Policies for Rapid Adaptation

The paper proposes a reward-based policy that relies only on rewards and actions, enabling zero‑shot transfer between source and target environments with entirely different observation spaces. Experiments on Pointmass, Cartpole, 2D Car Racing, and the Stretch robot in Habitat‑Sim show that the policy can adapt to new visual styles or 3D renderings without additional samples. Additionally, the reward policy can guide the training of an observation‑based policy in the target environment.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

MILER: Semantic Mid-Level Representation for Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning in Unstructured Autonomous Driving

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Online Adaptation of Visual Odometry Frontends with Image-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a visual odometry frontend that automatically and continuously adapts its parameters using an image-conditioned reinforcement learning policy. The policy selects key tuning values—FAST detection threshold, KLT patch size, and RANSAC rejection threshold—based on a lightweight image embedding and frontend statistics, with a privileged critic aiding training. Trained on synthetic data, the approach transfers zero‑shot to real-world benchmarks, improving the tracking‑computation trade‑off by up to 8% in accuracy and 57% in runtime compared to static configurations.

By Simone Nascivera, Leonard Bauersfeld, Jeff Delaune, Davide Scaramuzza
arXiv AI
Aug 12

Threat-guided Policy-aware Scene Perturbation for Safe Autonomous Driving with Online Reinforcement Learning

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 AI
Jul 24

Robostral Navigate

arXiv:2607. 20785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying navigation systems at scale requires a recipe that minimizes sensor assumptions, generalizes across robot embodiments, and trains efficiently.

By Arjun Majumdar, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Benjamin Tibi, Chris Bamford, Elliot Chane-Sane, Guillaume Lample, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Ludovic Ho Fuh, Mathieu Poiree, Olivier Duchenne, Rosalie Millner, Srijan Mishra, Theo Cachet, Thomas Chabal
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 17

CORAL: Curriculum-Optimized Reward Adaptation for LiDAR-Based Goal-Directed Urban Driving

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.

By Anisa Saleem, Duksu Kim