CuRLA: Curriculum Learning Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Uppuluri, Bhargava, Patel, Anjel, Mehta, Neil, Kamath, Sridhar, Chakraborty, Pratyush
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Uppuluri, Bhargava
Patel, Anjel
Mehta, Neil
Kamath, Sridhar
Chakraborty, Pratyush
author_facet Uppuluri, Bhargava
Patel, Anjel
Mehta, Neil
Kamath, Sridhar
Chakraborty, Pratyush
contents In autonomous driving, traditional Computer Vision (CV) agents often struggle in unfamiliar situations due to biases in the training data. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents address this by learning from experience and maximizing rewards, which helps them adapt to dynamic environments. However, ensuring their generalization remains challenging, especially with static training environments. Additionally, DRL models lack transparency, making it difficult to guarantee safety in all scenarios, particularly those not seen during training. To tackle these issues, we propose a method that combines DRL with Curriculum Learning for autonomous driving. Our approach uses a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent and a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn safe driving in the CARLA simulator. The agent is trained using two-fold curriculum learning, progressively increasing environment difficulty and incorporating a collision penalty in the reward function to promote safety. This method improves the agent's adaptability and reliability in complex environments, and understand the nuances of balancing multiple reward components from different feedback signals in a single scalar reward function. Keywords: Computer Vision, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Variational Autoencoder, Proximal Policy Optimization, Curriculum Learning, Autonomous Driving.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04982
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CuRLA: Curriculum Learning Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
Uppuluri, Bhargava
Patel, Anjel
Mehta, Neil
Kamath, Sridhar
Chakraborty, Pratyush
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
In autonomous driving, traditional Computer Vision (CV) agents often struggle in unfamiliar situations due to biases in the training data. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents address this by learning from experience and maximizing rewards, which helps them adapt to dynamic environments. However, ensuring their generalization remains challenging, especially with static training environments. Additionally, DRL models lack transparency, making it difficult to guarantee safety in all scenarios, particularly those not seen during training. To tackle these issues, we propose a method that combines DRL with Curriculum Learning for autonomous driving. Our approach uses a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent and a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn safe driving in the CARLA simulator. The agent is trained using two-fold curriculum learning, progressively increasing environment difficulty and incorporating a collision penalty in the reward function to promote safety. This method improves the agent's adaptability and reliability in complex environments, and understand the nuances of balancing multiple reward components from different feedback signals in a single scalar reward function. Keywords: Computer Vision, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Variational Autoencoder, Proximal Policy Optimization, Curriculum Learning, Autonomous Driving.
title CuRLA: Curriculum Learning Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04982