The paper introduces a stage‑wise closed‑loop evaluation method to track how compression techniques affect learned driving policies. Using a POMDP formulation and PPO‑trained belief‑state policy in Gym‑Duckietown, the authors compress the actor step by step and test it across five driving curricula. They find that structured pruning first degrades driving capability, distillation can partially recover it but is limited by rehearsal data, and integer quantization further loses curricula requiring stopping and resuming, whereas the unpruned actor retains all curricula.
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.
arXiv:2608.22549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Batched simulators for autonomous driving have recently enabled training reinforcement learning (RL) agents at scale, encompassing thousands of traffic...
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.
The paper introduces Endpoint-Constrained Optimization (ECO), a lightweight postprocessing layer that corrects intermediate waypoints of end-to-end driving policies while preserving the predicted endpoint. ECO does not require maps, privileged simulator state, or additional training, and can be applied to a wide range of waypoint-emitting policies. Experiments on two closed-loop simulators show that ECO significantly improves closed-loop performance, achieving top results in the HUGSIM Closed-Loop Driving Challenge and boosting scene scores on AlpaSim.
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. 01133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) policies in autonomous driving fundamentally relies on extrinsic statistical indicators (e.
arXiv:2607. 08925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training reinforcement-learning agents directly on physical robots makes every fall costly, since a fall can damage the platform and cannot be undone like a simulator reset; the goal is therefore to minimize falls during training rather than trade them off against return, as constrained Markov decision process (MDP) formulations do.
arXiv:2603. 27044v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is widely recognized as sample-inefficient, a limitation attributable in part to the high dimensionality and substantial functional redundancy inherent to the policy parameter space.
arXiv:2602. 07339v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based trajectory planners can model multi-modal driving behavior, but their iterative denoising process introduces a latency bottleneck for real-time closed-loop deployment.
arXiv:2601. 00898v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based policies have gained growing popularity in solving a wide range of decision-making tasks due to their superior expressiveness and controllable generation during inference.
arXiv:2401. 11512v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the most suitable variables to represent the state is a fundamental challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL).
The paper investigates how reusing past samples can improve the sample efficiency of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Two variants, wPPO-U and wPPO-BH, are introduced within a multiple importance weighting framework, each reusing data from recent iterations while preserving core PPO mechanics. The authors derive theoretical policy improvement bounds for both variants and empirically evaluate their impact on continuous control tasks.