J. Marius Zoellner

Ahmed Abouelazm, Jonas Michel, J. Marius Zoellner

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an important approach for autonomous driving. A reward function is used in reinforcement learning to establish the learned skill objectives and guide the agent toward the optimal policy. Since autonomous driving is a complex domain with partly conflicting objectives with varying degrees of priority, developing a suitable reward function represents a fundamental challenge. This paper aims to highlight the gap in such function design by assessing different proposed formulations in the literature and dividing individual objectives into Safety, Comfort, Progress, and Traffic Rules compliance categories. Additionally, the limitations of the reviewed reward functions are discussed, such as objectives aggregation and indifference to driving context. Furthermore, the reward categories are frequently inadequately formulated and lack standardization. This paper concludes by proposing future research that potentially addresses the observed shortcomings in rewards, including a reward validation framework and structured rewards that are context-aware and able to resolve conflicts.

Melih Yazgan, Mythra Varun Akkanapragada, J. Marius Zoellner

This survey offers a comprehensive examination of collaborative perception datasets in the context of Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X). It highlights the latest developments in large-scale benchmarks that accelerate advancements in perception tasks for autonomous vehicles. The paper systematically analyzes a variety of datasets, comparing them based on aspects such as diversity, sensor setup, quality, public availability, and their applicability to downstream tasks. It also highlights the key challenges such as domain shift, sensor setup limitations, and gaps in dataset diversity and availability. The importance of addressing privacy and security concerns in the development of datasets is emphasized, regarding data sharing and dataset creation. The conclusion underscores the necessity for comprehensive, globally accessible datasets and collaborative efforts from both technological and research communities to overcome these challenges and fully harness the potential of autonomous driving.

Karam Daaboul, Florian Kuhm, Tim Joseph et al.

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) aims to acquire meta-knowledge for quick adaptation to diverse tasks. However, applying these policies in real-world environments presents a significant challenge in balancing rapid adaptability with adherence to environmental constraints. Our novel approach, Constraint Model Agnostic Meta Learning (C-MAML), merges meta learning with constrained optimization to address this challenge. C-MAML enables rapid and efficient task adaptation by incorporating task-specific constraints directly into its meta-algorithm framework during the training phase. This fusion results in safer initial parameters for learning new tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of C-MAML in simulated locomotion with wheeled robot tasks of varying complexity, highlighting its practicality and robustness in dynamic environments.