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Related papers: Reward Signal Design for Autonomous Racing

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Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles in real-world tasks with high-dimensional state spaces and long horizons, where sparse or fixed rewards severely slow down exploration and cause agents to get trapped in local optima. This paper…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Hürkan Şahin , Van Huyen Dang , Erdi Sayar , Alper Yegenoglu , Erdal Kayacan

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

This paper presents CLIP-RLDrive, a new reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for improving the decision-making of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in complex urban driving scenarios, particularly in unsignalized intersections. To achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Erfan Doroudian , Hamid Taghavifar

Sampling-based trajectory planners are widely used for agile autonomous driving due to their ability to generate fast, smooth, and kinodynamically feasible trajectories. However, their behavior is often governed by a cost function with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Alexander Langmann , Yevhenii Tokarev , Mattia Piccinini , Korbinian Moller , Johannes Betz

When learning to behave in a stochastic environment where safety is critical, such as driving a vehicle in traffic, it is natural for human drivers to plan fallback strategies as a backup to use if ever there is an unexpected change in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Ugo Lecerf , Christelle Yemdji-Tchassi , Sébastien Aubert , Pietro Michiardi

Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nan Tang , Jing-Cheng Pang , Guanlin Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

In this work, we present a rigorous end-to-end control strategy for autonomous vehicles aimed at minimizing lap times in a time attack racing event. We also introduce AutoRACE Simulator developed as a part of this research project, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Chinmay Vilas Samak , Tanmay Vilas Samak , Sivanathan Kandhasamy

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Motion planning under uncertainty is one of the main challenges in developing autonomous driving vehicles. In this work, we focus on the uncertainty in sensing and perception, resulted from a limited field of view, occlusions, and sensing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Kasra Rezaee , Peyman Yadmellat , Simon Chamorro

The classical method of autonomous racing uses real-time localisation to follow a precalculated optimal trajectory. In contrast, end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (DRL) can train agents to race using only raw LiDAR scans. While…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Benjamin David Evans , Herman Arnold Engelbrecht , Hendrik Willem Jordaan

One of the key challenges in current Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based Automated Driving (AD) agents is achieving flexible, precise, and human-like behavior cost-effectively. This paper introduces an innovative approach that uses large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Ziqi Zhou , Jingyue Zhang , Jingyuan Zhang , Yangfan He , Boyue Wang , Tianyu Shi , Alaa Khamis

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Traditional trajectory planning methods for autonomous vehicles have several limitations. For example, heuristic and explicit simple rules limit generalizability and hinder complex motions. These limitations can be addressed using…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Hyunwoo Park

In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards are a natural way to specify the task to be learned. However, most RL algorithms struggle to learn in this setting since the learning signal is mostly zeros. In contrast, humans are good at…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a method for learning decision-making tasks that could enable robots to learn and adapt to their situation on-line. For an RL algorithm to be practical for robotic control tasks, it must learn in very few…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Todd Hester , Michael Quinlan , Peter Stone

This work investigates the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to tackle robot motion planning challenges in the dynamic RoboCup Small Size League (SSL). Using a heuristic control approach, we evaluate RL's effectiveness in…

Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jerry Zhi-Yang He , Anca D. Dragan

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) for privileged planning in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art approaches for this task are rule-based, but these methods do not scale to the long tail. RL, on the other hand, is scalable and does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Bernhard Jaeger , Daniel Dauner , Jens Beißwenger , Simon Gerstenecker , Kashyap Chitta , Andreas Geiger

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Siyuan Li , Shijie Han , Yingnan Zhao , By Liang , Peng Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based driver assistance systems seek to improve fuel consumption via continual improvement of powertrain control actions considering experiential data from the field. However, the need to explore diverse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Lindsey Kerbel , Andrej Ivanco , Keith Loiselle