Prompt-Driven Domain Adaptation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving via In-Context RL

TL;DR

This paper introduces an inference-time, prompt-driven domain adaptation method for autonomous driving that leverages in-context reinforcement learning to improve safety and efficiency in adverse weather without retraining.

Contribution

It extends prompt-driven domain adaptation to closed-loop autonomous driving using in-context reinforcement learning, avoiding additional data collection or model updates.

Findings

ICRL improves safety in adverse weather conditions

ICRL enhances driving efficiency and comfort

Outperforms existing prompt-driven DA baselines in CARLA simulations

Abstract

Despite significant progress and advances in autonomous driving, many end-to-end systems still struggle with domain adaptation (DA), such as transferring a policy trained under clear weather to adverse weather conditions. Typical DA strategies in the literature include collecting additional data in the target domain or re-training the model, or both. Both these strategies quickly become impractical as we increase scale and complexity of driving. These limitations have encouraged investigation into few-shot and zero-shot prompt-driven DA at inference time involving LLMs and VLMs. These methods work by adding a few state-action trajectories during inference to the prompt (similar to in-context learning). However, there are two limitations of such an approach: $(i)$ prompt-driven DA methods are currently restricted to perception tasks such as detection and segmentation and $(ii)$ they require expert few-shot data. In this work, we present a new approach to inference-time few-shot prompt-driven DA for closed-loop autonomous driving in adverse weather condition using in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL). Similar to other prompt-driven DA methods, our approach does not require any updates to the model parameters nor does it require additional data collection in adversarial weather regime. Furthermore, our approach advances the state-of-the-art in prompt-driven DA by extending to closed driving using general trajectories observed during inference. Our experiments using the CARLA simulator show that ICRL results in safer, more efficient, and more comfortable driving policies in the target domain compared to state-of-the-art prompt-driven DA baselines.