Reliable Policy Transfer for Safety-Aware End-to-End Driving with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Uddin Md. Borhan, Arif Raza, Zhiliang Lin, Lu Wang, Jianqiang Li, Jie Chen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 32134-32143

End-to-End (E2E) Reinforcement Learning (RL) for autonomous driving still struggles with safety and generalization under distribution shift, as perception-heavy encoders, sparse rewards, and ad hoc uncertainty handling yield brittle closed-loop behavior. This work introduces a unified Deep RL (DRL) framework built around a control-layer reliability interface where the same uncertainty signal informs relational attention, gates policy entropy, and regularizes transfer alignment. An ego-centric relational graph encodes agent influence via uncertainty-weighted attention over kinematics, lane geometry, and semantics, producing a compact control state. A multi-objective differentiable reward shapes safety, progress, and comfort with an uncertainty term. Aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty, captured through per-edge heteroscedastic variance and a critic ensemble, modulate policy entropy for risk-aware exploration. A causal-semantic transfer objective aligns actions, attention, and uncertainty statistics across domains with meta-learned initialization for few-shot adaptation. In closed-loop urban driving across varied towns, traffic, and weather, the framework improves success rate, reduces infractions, and achieves higher time-to-conflict combined with lower lateral deviation over strong baselines.