Papers › GRI: General Reinforced Imitation and its Application to Vision-Based Autonomous Driving

GRI: General Reinforced Imitation and its Application to Vision-Based Autonomous Driving

16 Nov 2021arXiv:2111.08575archive 2025-07-28

Raphael Chekroun, Marin Toromanoff, Sascha Hornauer, Fabien Moutarde

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been demonstrated to be effective for several complex decision-making applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. However, DRL is notoriously limited by its high sample complexity and its lack of stability. Prior knowledge, e.g. as expert demonstrations, is often available but challenging to leverage to mitigate these issues. In this paper, we propose General Reinforced Imitation (GRI), a novel method which combines benefits from exploration and expert data and is straightforward to implement over any off-policy RL algorithm. We make one simplifying hypothesis: expert demonstrations can be seen as perfect data whose underlying policy gets a constant high reward. Based on this assumption, GRI introduces the notion of offline demonstration agents. This agent sends expert data which are processed both concurrently and indistinguishably with the experiences coming from the online RL exploration agent. We show that our approach enables major improvements on vision-based autonomous driving in urban environments. We further validate the GRI method on Mujoco continuous control tasks with different off-policy RL algorithms. Our method ranked first on the CARLA Leaderboard and outperforms World on Rails, the previous state-of-the-art, by 17%.

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Tasks

Autonomous DrivingCARLA MAP LeaderboardContinuous ControlDecision MakingDeep Reinforcement LearningMuJoCocontinuous-control

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Autonomous Driving CARLA Leaderboard GRIAD Driving Score 36.79 #10 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Autonomous Driving CARLA Leaderboard GRIAD Infraction penalty 0.6 #10 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Autonomous Driving CARLA Leaderboard GRIAD Route Completion 61.85 #10 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA MAP Leaderboard CARLA GRI-based DRL Driving score 33.785 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA MAP Leaderboard CARLA GRI-based DRL Infraction penalty 0.568 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA MAP Leaderboard CARLA GRI-based DRL Route completion 57.442 #4 of 8 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

CARLAEntropy RegularizationPPO

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