arXiv:2608. 16710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As autonomous vehicles (AVs) approach Level 4 and Level 5 operational capability [SAE International, 2018], their on- board decision systems must handle not only safety-critical locomotion but also their subsequent moral weight.
arXiv:2606. 25127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how reward design shapes the internal attention patterns of reinforcement learning agents trained for autonomous driving.
arXiv:2408. 12548v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) has become central to Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), supporting perception, prediction, planning, control, and decision-making in dynamic environments.
arXiv:2608. 14642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents trained on a single reward signal exploit the gap between the designed reward and the intended behavior.
arXiv:2609.15544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enabling human stakeholders to specify reward functions that lead to their desired outcomes is a key challenge in deploying reinforcement learning ag...
arXiv:2606. 31106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale datasets and fast simulators have enabled improvements in driving policies that appear safe and robust, yet strong performance in nominal scenarios can still mask flawed reasoning and unsafe heuristics.
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.
arXiv:2607. 13172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address the problem of safely training an agent policy and deploying a good and safe policy, in settings where the environment dynamics are unknown and no suitable reward function is available.
arXiv:2606. 02641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive driving exposes a failure mode that is easy to miss in rule-aware autonomous-driving stacks: a hard-rule margin can be negative for an ego candidate even though a small lawful accommodation by a non-priority agent would restore feasibility.
CAR‑VLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action model for autonomous driving that jointly considers scene complexity and dynamic risk to determine reasoning depth, urgency, and focus. It maps four complexity‑risk categories to three reasoning modes—Fast Intuition, Slow Thinking, and Reflex Response—each tailored to different driving scenarios. The model is trained via progressive supervised learning and reinforcement learning, achieving competitive performance on NAVSIM and Navhard benchmarks and demonstrating risk‑aware reasoning in high‑risk scenarios.
arXiv:2609.38016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained Reinforcement Learning has recently gained increasing attention in the field of Safe Autonomous Driving, where the general mechanism is to...
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.
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.