arXiv subjects

Feeza Khan Khanzada

Publications and source records attributed to Feeza Khan Khanzada.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BranchDrive: A Branch-Structured Dataset for Action-Conditioned Driving Prediction

Most autonomous-driving datasets record only the action executed by a behavior policy and the single future that followed, providing limited supervision for comparing alternative ego decisions. We introduce BranchDrive, a branch-structured CARLA dataset and benchmark that pairs one canonical pre-decision history with one nominal expert future and twelve physically executed intervention futures spanning acceleration, braking, and left- and right-steering policies at three magnitudes. Each intervention lasts 2.5 s and is followed by expert recovery. Following control-compliance, modality-completeness, replay-fidelity, and action-leakage audits, the frozen benchmark contains 606 independent branch groups and 7,878 associated trajectories. We evaluate prediction of six continuous short-horizon outcomes and a ten-step ego trajectory using action-only, history-only, structured, visual, multimodal, and privileged bird's-eye-view models. On the held-out test split, the structured history-and-action model achieves a macro normalized mean absolute error of 0.5036 and an average displacement error of 2.2042 m, significantly outperforming both restricted baselines. In full-information offline evaluation, its outcome-derived selector increases balanced policy value from 0.5364 to 0.5704 and reduces normalized regret from 0.2674 to 0.1495 relative to the frozen action prior. However, a validation-calibrated minimum-separation guard rejects every intervention, showing that conservative execution remains unresolved. BranchDrive therefore supports action-conditioned short-horizon prediction and fixed-bank offline decision evaluation, but does not establish exact causal effects, binary safety prediction, or closed-loop safety improvement.

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arXiv2026

Mind the Privileged-to-Camera Gap: Actor-Centric Sidecar Supervision for Camera-First Open-Loop Waypoint Prediction

Camera-first autonomous-driving models predict future ego waypoints from images, ego-state features, and route commands, but waypoint supervision alone does not explicitly supervise actor-level representations of nearby road users. We study this as supervised representation learning for open-loop waypoint prediction. The deployable model uses multi-view RGB, ego state, and route command at inference. During training, simulator-derived sidecar labels supervise actor grounding, privileged hindsight actor relevance relative to the logged ego trajectory, and selected-actor short-horizon motion; these labels are never inference inputs. We evaluate route-disjoint splits with matched architecture, optimizer, validation criterion, checkpoint selection, and three seeds. A plain waypoint-only RGB baseline obtains 1.815$\pm$0.02 m final displacement error (FDE), and the matched no-teacher non-sidecar RGB control obtains 1.716$\pm$0.02 m. Road-user sidecar supervision (RU-sidecar) reduces FDE to 1.223$\pm$0.01 m, a 32.6% reduction over the plain baseline and 28.7% over the matched no-teacher non-sidecar RGB control. It improves over the plain baseline on 1445/1494 routes and over the matched no-teacher non-sidecar RGB control on 1417/1494 routes. Actor-conditioned slices show gains in all nonempty subsets, including 29.1% reduction for samples with at least four valid sidecar actors and 30.0% when a vulnerable road user is present. Optional simulator-state teacher alignment reaches 1.186$\pm$0.15 m FDE, but higher seed variability makes it secondary. Non-deployable simulator-state diagnostics remain stronger, indicating a privileged-to-camera gap. The evidence is limited to open-loop simulation diagnostics.

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arXiv2026

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

Driving agents trained in one simulated town often perform poorly in a new town because the road shapes, intersections, and lane layouts can be different. This paper studies how to improve this kind of transfer in the CARLA driving simulator without giving the agent any training data from the test towns. The agent is trained only in Town05 and Town06, then evaluated directly in Town03 and Town04. To focus on road-layout differences, all experiments use the same weather and traffic settings. We propose a training method that encourages the agent to learn features that are useful across towns rather than features tied to one training town. During training, the agent is asked to predict the high-level visual meaning of future camera views and is also discouraged from relying on cues that reveal which source town the data came from. These extra learning signals are used only during training; at test time, the driving policy uses the same observation and control interface as the baseline agent. In controlled comparisons with matched DreamerV3-style world-model driving agents, the proposed method achieves the highest mean held-out success: 36.6\% on Town03 with a 95\% confidence interval of [30.5, 42.7] and 85.6\% on Town04 with a 95\% confidence interval of [84.0, 87.2], computed across five training seeds. Seed-paired tests against the strongest primary baselines show positive success-rate differences in both held-out towns. Additional experiments show that predicting future visual meaning alone or removing town-specific cues alone is not enough to match the combined method. These results suggest that combining future-scene understanding with reduced reliance on source-town-specific features can improve cross-town driving performance in this CARLA setting.

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arXiv2025

Driving Beyond Privilege: Distilling Dense-Reward Knowledge into Sparse-Reward Policies

We study how to exploit dense simulator-defined rewards in vision-based autonomous driving without inheriting their misalignment with deployment metrics. In realistic simulators such as CARLA, privileged state (e.g., lane geometry, infractions, time-to-collision) can be converted into dense rewards that stabilize and accelerate model-based reinforcement learning, but policies trained directly on these signals often overfit and fail to generalize when evaluated on sparse objectives such as route completion and collision-free overtaking. We propose reward-privileged world model distillation, a two-stage framework in which a teacher DreamerV3-style agent is first trained with a dense privileged reward, and only its latent dynamics are distilled into a student trained solely on sparse task rewards. Teacher and student share the same observation space (semantic bird's-eye-view images); privileged information enters only through the teacher's reward, and the student does not imitate the teacher's actions or value estimates. Instead, the student's world model is regularized to match the teacher's latent dynamics while its policy is learned from scratch on sparse success/failure signals. In CARLA lane-following and overtaking benchmarks, sparse-reward students outperform both dense-reward teachers and sparse-from-scratch baselines. On unseen lane-following routes, reward-privileged distillation improves success by about 23 percent relative to the dense teacher while maintaining comparable or better safety. On overtaking, students retain near-perfect performance on training routes and achieve up to a 27x improvement in success on unseen routes, with improved lane keeping. These results show that dense rewards can be leveraged to learn richer dynamics models while keeping the deployed policy optimized strictly for sparse, deployment-aligned objectives.

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arXiv2025

InDRiVE: Reward-Free World-Model Pretraining for Autonomous Driving via Latent Disagreement

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) can reduce interaction cost for autonomous driving by learning a predictive world model, but it typically still depends on task-specific rewards that are difficult to design and often brittle under distribution shift. This paper presents InDRiVE, a DreamerV3-style MBRL agent that performs reward-free pretraining in CARLA using only intrinsic motivation derived from latent ensemble disagreement. Disagreement acts as a proxy for epistemic uncertainty and drives the agent toward under-explored driving situations, while an imagination-based actor-critic learns a planner-free exploration policy directly from the learned world model. After intrinsic pretraining, we evaluate zero-shot transfer by freezing all parameters and deploying the pretrained exploration policy in unseen towns and routes. We then study few-shot adaptation by training a task policy with limited extrinsic feedback for downstream objectives (lane following and collision avoidance). Experiments in CARLA across towns, routes, and traffic densities show that disagreement-based pretraining yields stronger zero-shot robustness and robust few-shot collision avoidance under town shift and matched interaction budgets, supporting the use of intrinsic disagreement as a practical reward-free pretraining signal for reusable driving world models.

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arXiv2025

A Comprehensive Review of Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving in the CARLA Simulator

Autonomous-driving research has recently embraced deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a promising framework for data-driven decision making, yet a clear picture of how these algorithms are currently employed, benchmarked and evaluated is still missing. This survey fills that gap by systematically analysing around 100 peer-reviewed papers that train, test or validate RL policies inside the open-source CARLA simulator. We first categorize the literature by algorithmic family model-free, model-based, hierarchical, and hybrid and quantify their prevalence, highlighting that more than 80% of existing studies still rely on model-free methods such as DQN, PPO and SAC. Next, we explain the diverse state, action and reward formulations adopted across works, illustrating how choices of sensor modality (RGB, LiDAR, BEV, semantic maps, and carla kinematics states), control abstraction (discrete vs. continuous) and reward shaping are used across various literature. We also consolidate the evaluation landscape by listing the most common metrics (success rate, collision rate, lane deviation, driving score) and the towns, scenarios and traffic configurations used in CARLA benchmarks. Persistent challenges including sparse rewards, sim-to-real transfer, safety guarantees and limited behaviour diversity are distilled into a set of open research questions, and promising directions such as model-based RL, meta-learning and richer multi-agent simulations are outlined. By providing a unified taxonomy, quantitative statistics and a critical discussion of limitations, this review aims to serve both as a reference for newcomers and as a roadmap for advancing RL-based autonomous driving toward real-world deployment.

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arXiv2025

Action Space Reduction Strategies for Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving

Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising framework for autonomous driving by enabling agents to learn control policies through interaction with environments. However, large and high-dimensional action spaces often used to support fine-grained control can impede training efficiency and increase exploration costs. In this study, we introduce and evaluate two novel structured action space modification strategies for RL in autonomous driving: dynamic masking and relative action space reduction. These approaches are systematically compared against fixed reduction schemes and full action space baselines to assess their impact on policy learning and performance. Our framework leverages a multimodal Proximal Policy Optimization agent that processes both semantic image sequences and scalar vehicle states. The proposed dynamic and relative strategies incorporate real-time action masking based on context and state transitions, preserving action consistency while eliminating invalid or suboptimal choices. Through comprehensive experiments across diverse driving routes, we show that action space reduction significantly improves training stability and policy performance. The dynamic and relative schemes, in particular, achieve a favorable balance between learning speed, control precision, and generalization. These findings highlight the importance of context-aware action space design for scalable and reliable RL in autonomous driving tasks.

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arXiv2025

InDRiVE: Intrinsic Disagreement based Reinforcement for Vehicle Exploration through Curiosity Driven Generalized World Model

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving, where data efficiency and robustness are critical. Yet, existing solutions often rely on carefully crafted, task specific extrinsic rewards, limiting generalization to new tasks or environments. In this paper, we propose InDRiVE (Intrinsic Disagreement based Reinforcement for Vehicle Exploration), a method that leverages purely intrinsic, disagreement based rewards within a Dreamer based MBRL framework. By training an ensemble of world models, the agent actively explores high uncertainty regions of environments without any task specific feedback. This approach yields a task agnostic latent representation, allowing for rapid zero shot or few shot fine tuning on downstream driving tasks such as lane following and collision avoidance. Experimental results in both seen and unseen environments demonstrate that InDRiVE achieves higher success rates and fewer infractions compared to DreamerV2 and DreamerV3 baselines despite using significantly fewer training steps. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of purely intrinsic exploration for learning robust vehicle control behaviors, paving the way for more scalable and adaptable autonomous driving systems.

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