LORD: Large Models Based Opposite Reward Design for Autonomous Driving

Xin Ye, Feng Tao, Abhirup Mallik, Burhaneddin Yaman, Liu Ren; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 5072-5081

Reinforcement learning (RL) based autonomous driving has emerged as a promising alternative to data-driven imitation learning approaches. However crafting effective reward functions for RL poses challenges due to the complexity of defining and quantifying good driving behaviors across diverse scenarios. Recently large pretrained models have gained significant attention as zero-shot reward models for tasks specified with desired linguistic goals. However the desired linguistic goals for autonomous driving such as "drive safely" are ambiguous and incomprehensible by pretrained models. On the other hand undesired linguistic goals like "collision" are more concrete and tractable. In this work we introduce LORD a novel large models based opposite reward design through undesired linguistic goals to enable the efficient use of large pretrained models as zero-shot reward models. Through extensive experiments our proposed framework shows its efficiency in leveraging the power of large pretrained models for achieving safe and enhanced autonomous driving. Moreover the proposed approach shows improved generalization capabilities as it outperforms counterpart methods across diverse and challenging driving scenarios.