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

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Abouelazm, Ahmed, Klingebiel, Felix, Schörner, Philip, Zöllner, J. Marius
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Abouelazm, Ahmed
Klingebiel, Felix
Schörner, Philip
Zöllner, J. Marius
author_facet Abouelazm, Ahmed
Klingebiel, Felix
Schörner, Philip
Zöllner, J. Marius
contents Exploration in reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is inherently unsafe: agents must experience novel behaviors to learn, yet exploration can lead to collisions or off-road driving. We propose an uncertainty-aware framework that leverages expert advice to guide exploration while avoiding long-term dependence. Advice is triggered when epistemic or aleatoric uncertainty exceeds adaptive thresholds derived from rolling buffers, ensuring advice evolves with the agent's confidence. A commitment-cooldown strategy with a stochastic early-stop heuristic regulates the duration and frequency of guidance, exposing the agent to coherent maneuvers without exhausting the advice budget. Expert and agent experiences are combined in a shared replay buffer within an off-policy implicit quantile network (IQN) backbone, enabling efficient reuse of expert trajectories. Experiments in CARLA show that our method outperforms the IQN baseline, improving success by 5-7% and reducing failures, demonstrating that risk-sensitive uncertainty coupled with regulated expert integration enables safer and more efficient exploration for sensor-based RL policy learning in unsignalized intersection navigation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30576
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncertainty-Aware and Temporally Regulated Expert Advice in Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
Abouelazm, Ahmed
Klingebiel, Felix
Schörner, Philip
Zöllner, J. Marius
Artificial Intelligence
Exploration in reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is inherently unsafe: agents must experience novel behaviors to learn, yet exploration can lead to collisions or off-road driving. We propose an uncertainty-aware framework that leverages expert advice to guide exploration while avoiding long-term dependence. Advice is triggered when epistemic or aleatoric uncertainty exceeds adaptive thresholds derived from rolling buffers, ensuring advice evolves with the agent's confidence. A commitment-cooldown strategy with a stochastic early-stop heuristic regulates the duration and frequency of guidance, exposing the agent to coherent maneuvers without exhausting the advice budget. Expert and agent experiences are combined in a shared replay buffer within an off-policy implicit quantile network (IQN) backbone, enabling efficient reuse of expert trajectories. Experiments in CARLA show that our method outperforms the IQN baseline, improving success by 5-7% and reducing failures, demonstrating that risk-sensitive uncertainty coupled with regulated expert integration enables safer and more efficient exploration for sensor-based RL policy learning in unsignalized intersection navigation.
title Uncertainty-Aware and Temporally Regulated Expert Advice in Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30576