Lisen Mu

Changze Li, Zhe Chen, Shaoyu Chen et al.

In recent years, autonomous parking has made significant advances, yet parking tasks still face challenges in extreme scenarios such as mechanical and dead-end parking slots, often resulting in failures. This is mainly due to traditional parking methods adopting a multistage approach, lacking the ability to optimize the parking problem as a whole. End-to-end methods enable joint optimization across perception and planning modules to eliminate the accumulation of errors, enhancing algorithm performance in extreme scenarios. Although several end-to-end parking methods use imitation or reinforcement learning, the former is limited by data cost and distribution coverage, while the latter suffers from inefficient exploration. To address these challenges, we propose a Reinforcement learning End-to-end Autonomous Parking method (REAP). REAP employs Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) within an asymmetric reinforcement learning framework to improve training efficiency and inference performance. To accelerate model convergence, we distill the capabilities of a rule-based planner into the end-to-end network through behavior cloning. We further introduce a soft predictive collision penalty mechanism to reduce collision rates by penalizing obstacle-approaching actions. To ensure that the trained reinforcement learning network can directly transfer to real-world scenarios, we have established a Real2Sim2Real simulator. In the Real2Sim step, we use 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to transform real-world scenes into digital scenes. In the Sim2Real step, we deploy the end-to-end model onto the vehicle to bridge the Sim2Real gap. Trained in the 3DGS simulator and deployed on physical vehicles, REAP successfully parks in various types of parking spaces, especially demonstrating the feasibility of end-to-end RL parking in extremely narrow mechanical slots.

Yukang Chen, Gaofeng Meng, Qian Zhang et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an important yet challenging task in network design due to its high computational consumption. To address this issue, we propose the Reinforced Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (RE- NAS), which is an evolutionary method with the reinforced mutation for NAS. Our method integrates reinforced mutation into an evolution algorithm for neural architecture exploration, in which a mutation controller is introduced to learn the effects of slight modifications and make mutation actions. The reinforced mutation controller guides the model population to evolve efficiently. Furthermore, as child models can inherit parameters from their parents during evolution, our method requires very limited computational resources. In experiments, we conduct the proposed search method on CIFAR-10 and obtain a powerful network architecture, RENASNet. This architecture achieves a competitive result on CIFAR-10. The explored network architecture is transferable to ImageNet and achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy, i.e., 75.7% top-1 accuracy with 5.36M parameters on mobile ImageNet. We further test its performance on semantic segmentation with DeepLabv3 on the PASCAL VOC. RENASNet outperforms MobileNet-v1, MobileNet-v2 and NASNet. It achieves 75.83% mIOU without being pre-trained on COCO.

Jingchu Liu, Pengfei Hou, Lisen Mu et al.

Tactical driving decision making is crucial for autonomous driving systems and has attracted considerable interest in recent years. In this paper, we propose several practical components that can speed up deep reinforcement learning algorithms towards tactical decision making tasks: 1) non-uniform action skipping as a more stable alternative to action-repetition frame skipping, 2) a counter-based penalty for lanes on which ego vehicle has less right-of-road, and 3) heuristic inference-time action masking for apparently undesirable actions. We evaluate the proposed components in a realistic driving simulator and compare them with several baselines. Results show that the proposed scheme provides superior performance in terms of safety, efficiency, and comfort.