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:2609.36851v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving policies are commonly trained via imitation learning on logged demonstrations without observing the consequences of their...
By Hongbin Lin, Chaoda Zheng, Yiming Yang, Xiangyu Li, Shijia Chen, Jinhao Deng, Kangjie Chen, Dongbin Zhang, Jie Feng, Yu Zhang, Xianming Liu, Shuguang Cui, Boyang Wang, Zhen Li
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.
By Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Zhengyang Wan, Yansong Qu, Junwei You, Sicong Jiang, Sikai Chen
arXiv:2606. 03159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous vehicle capabilities advance, the safe evaluation of driving policies in long-tail scenarios remains a critical bottleneck.
By NVIDIA, :, Aarti Basant, Amlan Kar, Despoina Paschalidou, Fangyin Wei, Francesco Ferroni, Guillermo Garcia Cobo, Haithem Turki, Huan Ling, Jaewoo Seo, James Lucas, Jay Zhangjie Wu, Jialiang Wang, Jonathan Lorraine, Jun Gao, Kai He, Katarina Tothova, Kevin Xie, Micha{\l} Tyszkiewicz, Qi Wu, Riccardo de Lutio, Ruilong Li, Sanja Fidler, Seung Wook Kim, Tianchang Shen, Tianshi Cao, Tobias Pfaff, William Lew, Xindi Wu, Xuanchi Ren, Yifan Lu, Yuxuan Zhang, Zan Gojcic, Zian Wang
As autonomous vehicle capabilities advance, the safe evaluation of driving policies in long-tail scenarios remains a critical bottleneck. In closed-loop simulation, the driving policy model actively interacts with the environment, where its actions dynamically update the simulator state and directly influence the next set of generated sensor observations.
The paper introduces a low‑cost, open experimental platform for end‑to‑end autonomous driving on miniature Ackermann vehicles, combining a physical car, printed track, data collection tools, trajectory registration, and a Webots digital twin. It implements command‑conditioned behavior cloning, achieving a mean cross‑track error of 6.1 cm on the real vehicle and demonstrating the impact of camera field of view in simulation. Using synthetic data from the digital twin and a sim‑to‑real image translator, a higher‑capacity policy trained on both synthetic and real data completes all four track routes, outperforming the baseline trained only on real data.
By Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gabriel George Zipperer