# Learning by Cheating

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.12294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 383 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 383)

- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07488/) (2023)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23262/) (2024)
- [How to Train Your Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning; Lessons We've Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02915/) (2021)
- [Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14024/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08265/) (2021)
- [NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04456/) (2021)
- [Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06242/) (2023)
- [Rapid Locomotion via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02824/) (2022)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08481/) (2024)
- [A System for General In-Hand Object Re-Orientation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03043/) (2021)
- [Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08710/) (2023)
- [Legged Locomotion in Challenging Terrains using Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07638/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01941/) (2025)
- [Model-Based Imitation Learning for Urban Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07729/) (2022)
- [Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04218/) (2025)
- [Robot Parkour Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05665/) (2023)
- [DriveAdapter: Breaking the Coupling Barrier of Perception and Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00398/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-based urban driving is hard. The autonomous system needs to learn to perceive the world and act in it. We show that this challenging learning problem can be simplified by decomposing it into two stages. We first train an agent that has access to privileged information. This privileged agent cheats by observing the ground-truth layout of the environment and the positions of all traffic participants. In the second stage, the privileged agent acts as a teacher that trains a purely vision-based sensorimotor agent. The resulting sensorimotor agent does not have access to any privileged information and does not cheat. This two-stage training procedure is counter-intuitive at first, but has a number of important advantages that we analyze and empirically demonstrate. We use the presented approach to train a vision-based autonomous driving system that substantially outperforms the state of the art on the CARLA benchmark and the recent NoCrash benchmark. Our approach achieves, for the first time, 100% success rate on all tasks in the original CARLA benchmark, sets a new record on the NoCrash benchmark, and reduces the frequency of infractions by an order of magnitude compared to the prior state of the art. For the video that summarizes this work, see https://youtu.be/u9ZCxxD-UUw