RL for Autonomous Driving

RL: Reinforcement Learning

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10 papers in the last four weeks, up 150% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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  1. Meta-Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Fast Adaptation of Interactive Policies with Applications to Autonomous Driving

    Sep 30, 2026Huiwen Yan, Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis, Mushuang LiuMeta-Reinforcement LearningRL for Autonomous Driving

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA · Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

  2. Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory

    Sep 29, 2026Kai Yan, Xiangyu Chen, Yulong Cao +9Memory-Augmented VLMsVLMs for Autonomous Driving

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · NVIDIA

  3. Brain-SAD: A Brain-Inspired Safe Autonomous Driving Control Framework with Dynamic Fear-Oriented Constraint on Dual-Policy

    Sep 29, 2026Huan Rong, Chao Yin, Anouar Imel +2Constrained RLRL for Autonomous Driving

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Jiangsu, Nanjing, 210-044, China · School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan, Chengdu, 611731, China · School of Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, 210044, Jiangsu, China +1

  4. RoXDrive: Closed-Loop Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Action-Faithful Rollouts

    Sep 29, 2026Hongbin Lin, Chaoda Zheng, Yiming Yang +11End-to-End Autonomous DrivingAction-Conditioned World Models

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · XPeng Motors · Xidian University

  5. RefineDrive: Reliable Failure-Guided Learning for Vision-Language-Action Driving

    Sep 28, 2026Zhe Sun, Ziyi Luo, Yehao Lu +2VLMs for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd.

  6. Vision--Language Signals in Constrained RL: Safety Gains Without Anticipation

    Sep 28, 2026Samuel Tetteh, Cody FlemingConstrained RLRL for Autonomous Driving

    Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, USA

  7. Sometimes You Gotta Run Before You Can Walk: Run-then-Walk Scheduling Strategy for VLM Autonomous Driving

    Sep 22, 2026Yuqi Ye, Shangkun Sun, Junhong Lin +6VLMs for Autonomous DrivingGroup Relative Policy Optimization

    Peking University · Minieye Technology Co., Ltd · Fuzhou University

  8. MILER: Semantic Mid-Level Representation for Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning in Unstructured Autonomous Driving

    Sep 17, 2026Thomas Steinecker, Denis Trescher, Alexander Bienemann +2End-to-End Autonomous DrivingSim-to-Real Transfer

    Chair of Machine Perception for Autonomous Driving, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany

  9. Comfort by Construction: Adaptive, Comfort-Bounded Action Spaces for Learned Driving Policies

    Sep 14, 2026Anna Rothenhäusler, Daniel Jost, Raghu Rajan +4Constrained RLVehicle Dynamics

    University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany · Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Stuttgart, Germany · Coburg University of Applied Sciences, Coburg, Germany

  10. Proactive Context-Forecasted Safety Constraints for Nonstationary Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 8, 2026Tim TomashevskiyNon-Stationary RLConstrained RL

    Department of Computing and Software McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

  11. What Emerges and What Breaks in Self-Play Driving

    Aug 31, 2026Laur Sisask, Ardi Tampuu, Tambet MatiisenReward HackingSelf-Play RL

    University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

  12. Aligning Multi-Trajectory Supervision with Policy Optimization for VLA Driving

    Aug 31, 2026Tian Zhang, Zhuo Huang, Hongrui Ye +3VLMs for Autonomous DrivingGroup Relative Policy Optimization

    School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China · Dongfeng Research & Development Institute

  13. Language-Structured Relational Q-Learning for Threat-Aware Control in Safety-Critical Driving

    Aug 11, 2026Aditya Humnabadkar, Huaizhong Zhang, Ardhendu BeheraReinforcement LearningAutonomous Driving Safety Evaluation

    Department of Computer Sciences, Edge Hill University, United Kingdom

  14. Dreamer-SAC: Off-Policy Learning in Latent World Models for Sample-Efficient Autonomous Driving

    Aug 11, 2026Jiazhuo Li, Linjiang Cao, Qi Liu +1World Models for Autonomous DrivingRL for Autonomous Driving

    Tongji University

  15. Pictura: Perspective-View Self-Play at Scale for Driving

    Jul 28, 2026Yuan Yin, Elias Ramzi, Marc Lafon +8Self-Play RLRL for Autonomous Driving

    valeo.ai, Paris, France · Valeo Brain, Créteil, France · Sorbonne Université, CNRS, ISIR, F-75005 Paris, France

  16. Optimal Reward Shaping: Autonomous Car Parking Case Study

    Jul 26, 2026Emre Özkaya, Nicolas R. GaugerDeep Q-LearningAutonomous Parking

    Chair for Scientific Computing, RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau Paul-Ehrlich-Strasse 34, 67663 Kaiserslautern

  17. Structured Reinforcement Learning for Bayesian Persuasion : Application to Intelligent Interactive Driving

    Jul 15, 2026Merlin Paul, Anup ApremReinforcement LearningRL for Autonomous Driving

  18. TerraZero: Procedural Driving Simulation for Zero-Demonstration Self-Play at Scale

    Jul 14, 2026Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Weixin Li +4Self-Play RLRL for Autonomous Driving

    1Applied Intuition · University of California, Berkeley

  19. LIDAR-AD: A Decoder-Free Latent-Interaction Dreamer with Action-Residual Chains for Autonomous Driving

    Jul 12, 2026Yongzhi Liu, Yang Xiao, Zhong Cao +5Latent Dynamics ModelingWorld Models for Autonomous Driving

    School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 211189, China · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA · Xheart Technology Co., Ltd., Suzhou, Jiangsu 215100, China

  20. A Risk-Field Enhanced Closed-Loop Digital Twin Framework for Autonomous Driving Safety Validation

    Jul 7, 2026Yongzhi LiuAutonomous Driving Safety EvaluationDigital Twins

    School of Mechanical Engineering Southeast University Nanjing, China

  21. CRRL: A Causality-Based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Autonomous System Recovery

    Jul 3, 2026Safia Fatima, Kai Olav Ellefsen, Leon MoonenReinforcement LearningRobot Failure Recovery

    Simula Research Laboratory, Norway · University of Oslo, Norway

  22. CLEAR: Closed-Loop Reinforcement Learning at Scale for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Jul 3, 2026Yunxiao Shi, Hong Cai, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh +1VLMs for Autonomous DrivingEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Qualcomm AI Research

  23. What Probing Reveals about Autonomous Driving: Linking Internal Prediction Errors to Ego Planning

    Jun 30, 2026Hyeonchang Jeon, Kyungbeom Kim, Eugene Vinitsky +1Autonomous Driving Safety EvaluationAutonomous Driving Planning

    1Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) · 2New York University

  24. PlanRL: A Trajectory Planning Architecture for Reinforcement Learning-based Driving Experts

    Jun 25, 2026Joonhee Lim, Yongjae Lee, Jangho Shin +1Motion PlanningAutonomous Driving Planning

    Robotics Program, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 34141, South Korea · Cho Chun Shik Graduate School of Mobility, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 34141, South Korea · Hyundai Motor Company, Hwaseong 18280, South Korea

  25. Sample-efficient Transfer Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Reward Shaping and Policy-Ratio Reweighting Strategy

    Jun 25, 2026Wenjie Huang, Yang Li, Jingjia Teng +6Reinforcement LearningReward Shaping

    State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing Technology for Vehicle, College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China · Key Laboratory of Intelligent Air-Ground Cooperative Control for Universities in Chongqing, School of Automation, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China · Xi’an Institute of High-Tech, Xi’an 710025, China +1

  26. Reward-Conditioned Attention: How Reward Design Shapes What Autonomous Driving Agents See

    Jun 23, 2026Mohamed Benabdelouahad, Ahmed Djalal Hacini, Nadir Farhi +1Reward ShapingRL for Autonomous Driving

    National School of Artificial Intelligence (ENSIA), Sidi Abdellah Campus, Algiers, Algeria. · Cosys-Grettia, Univ Gustave Eiffel, F-77454 Marne-la-Vallee, France.

  27. FAST: A Framework for Aligned Sampling and Training in Parallel Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

    Jun 19, 2026Bonan Wang, Letian Tao, Bin Shuai +7Reinforcement LearningRL for Autonomous Driving

    School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Didi Voyager Labs, DiDi Autonomous Driving · School of Vehicle and Mobility and the College of AI, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

  28. TerraTransfer: Learning End-to-End Driving Policies Without Expert Demonstrations

    Jun 16, 2026Zikang Xiong, Weixin Li, Zhouchonghao Wu +6End-to-End Autonomous DrivingRL for Autonomous Driving

    1Applied Intuition · 2UCLA · 3UC Berkeley

  29. ROSA-RL: Uncertainty-Aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning

    Jun 15, 2026Anna-Lena Schlamp, Jeremias Gerner, Klaus Bogenberger +2Autonomous Driving PlanningRL for Autonomous Driving

    Institute AImotion Bavaria Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt Ingolstadt, Germany · School of Engineering and Design Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany · CARISSMA Institute of Automated Driving (C-IAD) Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt Ingolstadt, Germany

  30. Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning for Emergency Collision Avoidance

    Jun 13, 2026Yuhong Jiang, Shiyue Zhao, Junzhi Zhang +4Collision AvoidanceReachability Analysis

    School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  31. Safe Reinforcement Learning of Autonomous Highway Driving: A Unified Framework for Safety and Efficiency

    Jun 12, 2026Chufei Yan, Zhihao Cui, Yiyan Lv +3Reinforcement LearningMixture of Experts

    School of Physics, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, 130024, China. · 2Clean Energy Automotive Engineering Center, School of Automotive Studies, Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China. · 3Mengshi Automobile Technology Company, Dongfeng Motor Corporation, Wuhan, 430010, China.

  32. From Attacks to Curricula: Learnability-Guided Adversarial Training for Safe Autonomous Driving

    Jun 12, 2026Yuewen Mei, Tong Nie, Jie Sun +3Adversarial TrainingAutonomous Driving

    College of Transportation & Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China

  33. Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data

    Jun 11, 2026Daphne Cornelisse, Julian Hunt, Zixu Zhang +4Self-Play RLAutonomous Driving

    1NYU Tandon School of Engineering · 2NYU Courant · 3Princeton University +2

  34. Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

    Jun 9, 2026Samuel Tetteh, Cody FlemingConstrained RLRobot Safety

    Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, USA

  35. Uncertainty-Aware Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving in Mixed Traffic Environment

    Jun 8, 2026Ming Cheng, Hao Chen, Ziyi Yang +2Safe Motion PlanningMotion Planning

    Central South University · City University of Macau

  36. DriveReward: A Comprehensive Dataset and Generative Vision-Language Reward Model for Autonomous Driving

    Jun 7, 2026Qimao Chen, Fang Li, Yuechen Luo +11Autonomous Driving DatasetsAutonomous Driving Benchmarks

    1Tsinghua University · 2Xiaomi EV

  37. Path Planning Using Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

    Jun 5, 2026Qiang Le, Yaguang Yang, Isaac E. WeintraubConstrained Motion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23669, USA · Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH 45433, USA

  38. An LLM-Explainable DRL Framework for Passenger-Directed Autonomous Driving

    Jun 2, 2026Ouided Braoui, Meriem Bouali, Nadir FarhiExplainable Artificial IntelligenceAutonomous Driving

    LITAN, ESTIN, RN 75, Amizour, 06300, Bejaia, Algeria · Cosys-Grettia, Univ Gustave Eiffel, F-77454 Marne-la-Vallée, France

  39. DriveMA: Driving Vision-Language-Action Models with verifiable Meta-Actions

    May 29, 2026Weicheng Zheng, Yixin Huang, Qiao Sun +2VLMs for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving

    1Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute · 3Tongji University · 2IIIS Tsinghua University

  40. ZAPS-DA: Zero-Phase Action Policy Smoothing with Decoupled Actor for Continuous Control in Reinforcement Learning

    May 28, 2026Faiq ShamassRL ControlReinforcement Learning

    San Diego, CA, USA

  41. Uncertainty-Aware and Temporally Regulated Expert Advice in Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

    May 28, 2026Ahmed Abouelazm, Felix Klingebiel, Philip Schörner +1Reinforcement LearningRisk-Sensitive RL

    FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Germany · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

  42. SARAD: LLM-Based Safety-Aware Hybrid Reinforcement Learning with Collision Prediction for Autonomous Driving

    May 27, 2026Kangyu Wu, Peng Cui, Guoxi Chen +1Autonomous DrivingTraffic Accident Anticipation

    School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing, China · Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of Complex Systems of Engineering, Ministry of Education, Nanjing, China

  43. DriveMA: Rethinking Language Interfaces in Driving VLAs with One-Step Meta-Actions

    May 20, 2026Weicheng Zheng, Yixin Huang, Qiao Sun +2VLMs for Autonomous DrivingEfficient VLA Models

    Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute · Tongji University · Tsinghua University

  44. Distill to Think, Foresee to Act: Cognitive-Physical Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

    May 20, 2026Yang Wu, Qiang Meng, Zhaojiang Liu +3End-to-End Autonomous DrivingWorld Models

    SJTU · FDU · NJU

  45. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Safe Autonomous Driving Under Pedestrian Behavioral Uncertainty

    May 18, 2026Prakash Aryan, Kaushik Raghupathruni, Timo Kehrer +1Pedestrian Behavior ModelingHuman Behavior Simulation

    University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. · AI4I, The Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Turin, Italy.

  46. Generating Realistic Safety-Critical Scenarios for Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactions

    May 17, 2026Qingwen Pu, Kun Xie, Yuan Zhu +1Human Behavior SimulationAutonomous Driving Safety Evaluation

    Transportation Informatics Lab, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, United States · Inner Mongolia Center for Transportation Research, Inner Mongolia University, Rm A357A, Transportation Building, Inner Mongolia University South Campus, 49 S Xilin Rd, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, 010020, China · School of Transportation and Logistics, National Engineering Laboratory of Integrated Transportation Big Data Application Technology, National and Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Integrated Transportation Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China

  47. Beyond Safety Filtering: Control Barrier Function-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Connected and Automated Vehicles

    May 16, 2026Jianye Xu, Bassam AlrifaeeReward ShapingControl Barrier Functions

    Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Germany · Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany

  48. MAPLE: Latent Multi-Agent Play for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    May 13, 2026Rajeev Yasarla, Deepti Hegde, Hsin-Pai Cheng +9End-to-End Autonomous DrivingVision-Language-Action Models

    Qualcomm AI Research · Qualcomm Technologies, Inc

  49. Driving Intents Amplify Planning-Oriented Reinforcement Learning

    May 12, 2026Hengtong Lu, Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Chengmin Yang +4RL for Autonomous DrivingGoal-Conditioned RL

    Li Auto · Tsinghua University · CUHK MMLab

  50. MTA-RL: Robust Urban Driving via Multi-modal Transformer-based 3D Affordances and Reinforcement Learning

    May 11, 2026Guangli Chen, Dianzhao Li, Wenjian Zhong +2Camera-LiDAR FusionRL for Autonomous Driving

    Dongguan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Equipment and Smart Industry, School of Advanced Engineering, Great Bay University, Dongguan, China · Chair of Applied Statistics, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany · Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) Dresden/Leipzig, Dresden, Germany +1

  51. Beyond Self-Play and Scale: A Behavior Benchmark for Generalization in Autonomous Driving

    May 11, 2026Aron Distelzweig, Faris Janjoš, Andreas Look +7Autonomous Driving BenchmarksSelf-Play RL

    University of Freiburg · Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence · Coburg University of Applied Sciences +1

  52. REAP: Reinforcement-Learning End-to-End Autonomous Parking with Gaussian Splatting Simulator for Real2Sim2Real Transfer

    May 9, 2026Changze Li, Zhe Chen, Shaoyu Chen +7End-to-End Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Parking

    Horizon Robotics Technology Research and Development Co., Ltd.

  53. ReflectDrive-2: Reinforcement-Learning-Aligned Self-Editing for Discrete Diffusion Driving

    May 6, 2026Huimin Wang, Yue Wang, Bihao Cui +7Diffusion PolicyAutonomous Driving Planning

    LiAuto

  54. InterFuserDVS: Event-Enhanced Sensor Fusion for Safe RL-Based Decision Making

    May 5, 2026Mustafa Sakhaia, Kaung Sithua, Min Khant Soe Okea +1Event-Based VisionEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

    aFaculty of Computer Science, Electronics and Telecommunications, AGH University of Krakow, Krakow, 30-059, Poland · bAcademic Computer Centre AGH, Krakow, 30-950, Poland

  55. Dynamics Distillation for Efficient and Transferable Control Learning

    May 2, 2026Xunjiang Gu, Kashyap Chitta, Mahsa Golchoubian +2Vehicle DynamicsTransfer Learning

    University of Toronto · Vector Institute · NVIDIA +1

  56. GSDrive: Reinforcing Driving Policies by Multi-mode Future Trajectory Probing with 3D Gaussian Splatting Environment

    Apr 30, 2026Ziang Guo, Chen Min, Xuefeng Zhang +5End-to-End Autonomous DrivingRL for Autonomous Driving

    Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia. · Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems, SKLP, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. · SuZhou Automotive Research Institute, Tsinghua University, China. +1

  57. Dreaming Across Towns: Semantic Rollout and Town-Adversarial Regularization for Zero-Shot Held-Out-Town Fixed-Route Driving in CARLA

    Apr 30, 2026Feeza Khan Khanzada, Jaerock KwonDomain GeneralizationCross-Domain Generalization

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan–Dearborn, Dearborn, MI 48128 USA

  58. SpanVLA: Learning from Negative-Recovery Samples with Fast Action Bridging for Vision-Language-Action Model

    Apr 21, 2026Zewei Zhou, Ruining Yang, Xuewei Qi +7VLMs for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving

    Tony · University of California, Los Angeles, USA · Motional, USA +1

  59. Autonomous Vehicle Collision Avoidance With Racing Parameterized Deep Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 17, 2026Shathushan Sivashangaran, Vihaan Dutta, Apoorva Khairnar +2OOD GeneralizationAutonomous Driving

    Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23284, USA · University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA · Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA

  60. RAD-2: Scaling Reinforcement Learning in a Generator-Discriminator Framework

    Apr 16, 2026Hao Gao, Shaoyu Chen, Yifan Zhu +4Diffusion-Based PlanningRL for Diffusion Models

    Huazhong University of Science & Technology · Horizon Robotics