The paper presents a modeling and simulation framework to study reinforcement learning (RL) control of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platoon joining maneuvers in mixed traffic. Using SUMO and agent-based modeling, it evaluates Deep Q-Network (DQN), Double DQN (DDQN), and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithms, finding that PPO achieves a 98 % joining success rate with less than 1 % collision rate by incorporating risk penalties. The study also shows a trade‑off between safety, joining effectiveness, and decision efficiency, and demonstrates that an external safety controller can prevent collisions but may reduce joining efficiency.
By Biao Yin, Abderrahmane Kasmi, Nadir Farhi
The paper presents a modeling and simulation framework to study reinforcement‑learning control of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platoon joining maneuvers in mixed traffic. It evaluates Deep Q‑Network, Double Deep Q‑Network, and Proximal Policy Optimization algorithms, finding that PPO achieves a 98 % joining success rate with less than 1 % collisions by incorporating risk penalties, though it requires more decision steps. An external safety controller can prevent collisions but may reduce joining efficiency, highlighting a trade‑off between safety, effectiveness, and decision speed.
The paper introduces Composite‑Gradient Learning (CGL), a method that explicitly incorporates a model predictive controller (MPC) into the training of a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent by treating their control inputs as a joint action. CGL updates the DRL policy while accounting for the interaction with the MPC, unlike prior approaches that view MPC merely as part of the environment. Experiments on two freeway traffic networks show that CGL performs better than alternative methods when the interaction between DRL and MPC is strong, though overall gains are modest.
By Giray \"On\"ur, Azita Dabiri, Bart De Schutter
arXiv:2608. 10386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sample-efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is often limited by the trade-off between data efficiency and model bias.
By Jiazhuo Li, Linjiang Cao, Qi Liu, Xi Xiong
arXiv:2503. 23650v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL), with its ability to explore and optimize policies in complex, dynamic decision-making tasks, has emerged as a promising approach to addressing motion planning (MoP) challenges in autonomous driving (AD).
By Zhuoren Li, Guizhe Jin, Ran Yu, Weiqi Zhang, Zhiwen Chen, Nan Li, Lu Xiong, Ilya Kolmanovsky, Dimitar Filev, Bo Leng, Jia Hu
arXiv:2606. 30537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving policies should be able to improve continually as deployment exposes them to increasingly diverse and long-tail traffic situations.
By Cheng Gong, Haoyang Wang, Chao Lu, Zirui Li, Jianwei Gong
arXiv:2601. 18783v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Balancing safety, efficiency, and operational costs in highway driving poses a challenging decision-making problem for heavy-duty vehicles.
By Deepthi Pathare, Leo Laine, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani
arXiv:2609.25831v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent VLM-based autonomous driving planners adopt GRPO-style reinforcement learning to optimize driving performance. However, existing GRPO recipes...
By Yuqi Ye, Shangkun Sun, Junhong Lin, Jiayi Zhao, Changhao Peng, Wei Zheng, Guoqing Liu, Tiesong Zhao, Wei Gao
arXiv:2606. 29867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved significant success in robotics and autonomous systems, yet remains vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that can severely degrade performance.
By Adithya Mohan, Daniel Kriegl, Torsten Sch\"on
The paper introduces Solver-Gradient Guided Reinforcement Learning (SG‑RL), a method that augments standard RL with bounded gradients from a differentiable MPC solver to adapt cost‑function weights online. SG‑RL integrates solver‑gradient guidance into PPO through actor‑update scaling, policy loss, advantage estimation, and value‑function learning, achieving comparable or superior closed‑loop performance while requiring up to 70.6% fewer samples. Experiments on two autonomous racing platforms with intentional model mismatch demonstrate that SG‑RL outperforms both RL and gradient‑based policy learning baselines and generalizes zero‑shot to unseen environments.
By Baha Zarrouki, Arslan Thobani, Jasper Hoffmann, Mattia Piccinini, Rudolf Reiter, Felix Jahncke, S\'ebastien Gros, Davide Scaramuzza, Johannes Betz
arXiv:2606. 31291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning has the potential to solve attitude control problems more adaptively, precisely, and robustly by handling nonlinear dynamics, uncertainties, and failure cases more effectively than traditional attitude control approaches.
By Alexander Fabisch, Melvin Laux, Mariela De Lucas \'Alvarez, Edoardo Caroselli, Julian Theis
arXiv:2607. 07252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the synthesis of control policies directly from data, making it highly appealing for complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and robotics.
By Georg Sch\"afer, Jakob Rehrl, Stefan Huber, Simon Hirlaender