Papers › Coaching a Teachable Student

Coaching a Teachable Student

16 Jun 2023CVPR 2023 1arXiv:2306.10014archive 2025-07-28

Jimuyang Zhang, Zanming Huang, Eshed Ohn-Bar

We propose a novel knowledge distillation framework for effectively teaching a sensorimotor student agent to drive from the supervision of a privileged teacher agent. Current distillation for sensorimotor agents methods tend to result in suboptimal learned driving behavior by the student, which we hypothesize is due to inherent differences between the input, modeling capacity, and optimization processes of the two agents. We develop a novel distillation scheme that can address these limitations and close the gap between the sensorimotor agent and its privileged teacher. Our key insight is to design a student which learns to align their input features with the teacher's privileged Bird's Eye View (BEV) space. The student then can benefit from direct supervision by the teacher over the internal representation learning. To scaffold the difficult sensorimotor learning task, the student model is optimized via a student-paced coaching mechanism with various auxiliary supervision. We further propose a high-capacity imitation learned privileged agent that surpasses prior privileged agents in CARLA and ensures the student learns safe driving behavior. Our proposed sensorimotor agent results in a robust image-based behavior cloning agent in CARLA, improving over current models by over 20.6% in driving score without requiring LiDAR, historical observations, ensemble of models, on-policy data aggregation or reinforcement learning.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2306.10014")

Code

Syntology Ran 0 of 4 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 4 have no recorded run.

By repository: official repository: 4 samples from 1 repository, 0 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

h2xlab/CaT officialpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

4 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 4 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

4unverified

Licence: 0 of the 4 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from h2xlab/CaT. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

ResNet h2xlab/CaT/cat/teacher_planner.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f38ee76716f960df · report
TeacherPlanner h2xlab/CaT/cat/teacher_planner.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5ab83f0f476d36ee · report
_resnet h2xlab/CaT/cat/teacher_planner.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · ff664f13150043ba · report
resnet18 h2xlab/CaT/cat/teacher_planner.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 41f4a76380085329 · report

Tasks

CARLA longest6Knowledge DistillationRepresentation Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
CARLA longest6 CARLA Coaching a Teachable Student (CaT) Driving Score 58 #11 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA longest6 CARLA Coaching a Teachable Student (CaT) Infraction Score 0.77 #11 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA longest6 CARLA Coaching a Teachable Student (CaT) Route Completion 79 #11 of 21 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

ALIGNCARLAEntropy RegularizationKnowledge DistillationPPO

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections