mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Super-Human Performance in Gran Turismo Sport Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv 2008.07971 ↗First posted 18 Aug 2020cs.AI cs.LG cs.ROcited by 60

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous car racing is a major challenge in robotics. It raises fundamental problems for classical approaches such as planning minimum-time trajectories under uncertain dynamics and controlling the car at the limits of its handling. Besides, the requirement of minimizing the lap time, which is a sparse objective, and the difficulty of collecting training data from human experts have also hindered researchers from directly applying learning-based approaches to solve the problem. In the present work, we propose a learning-based system for autonomous car racing by leveraging a high-fidelity physical car simulation, a course-progress proxy reward, and deep reinforcement learning. We deploy our system in Gran Turismo Sport, a world-leading car simulator known for its realistic physics simulation of different race cars and tracks, which is even used to recruit human race car drivers. Our trained policy achieves autonomous racing performance that goes beyond what had been achieved so far by the built-in AI, and, at the same time, outperforms the fastest driver in a dataset of over 50,000 human players.

Key facts. Cited by 60 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2020.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 11; 2022: 8; 2023: 17; 2024: 8; 2025: 12; 2026: 4.

60 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2022MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledgecited by 469
  2. 2021VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehiclescited by 81
  3. 2022Autonomous Vehicles on the Edge: A Survey on Autonomous Vehicle Racingcited by 56
  4. 2021Autonomous Drone Racing with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 51
  5. 2023Read and Reap the Rewards: Learning to Play Atari with the Help of Instruction Manualscited by 45
  6. 2021Autonomous Overtaking in Gran Turismo Sport Using Curriculum Reinforcement Learningcited by 41
  7. 2025CaRL: Learning Scalable Planning Policies with Simple Rewardscited by 34
  8. 2024Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Surveycited by 30
  9. 2023Emergence of In-Context Reinforcement Learning from Noise Distillationcited by 26
  10. 2021Learn-to-Race: A Multimodal Control Environment for Autonomous Racingcited by 23
  11. 2021Latent Imagination Facilitates Zero-Shot Transfer in Autonomous Racingcited by 22
  12. 2021On Expressivity and Trainability of Quadratic Networkscited by 19
38 more
  1. 2021Computational Benefits of Intermediate Rewards for Goal-Reaching Policy Learningcited by 17
  2. 2021Unifying Cardiovascular Modelling with Deep Reinforcement Learning for Uncertainty Aware Control of Sepsis Treatmentcited by 16
  3. 2023Safety-aware Causal Representation for Trustworthy Offline Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Drivingcited by 16
  4. 2021Safe Autonomous Racing via Approximate Reachability on Ego-visioncited by 13
  5. 2023FastRLAP: A System for Learning High-Speed Driving via Deep RL and Autonomous Practicingcited by 13
  6. 2024A Super-human Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Autonomous Racing in Gran Turismocited by 12
  7. 2023Contrastive Learning for Enhancing Robust Scene Transfer in Vision-based Agile Flightcited by 11
  8. 2025Enhancing Autonomous Driving Systems with On-Board Deployed Large Language Modelscited by 11
  9. 2025A Comprehensive Review of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Video Gamescited by 9
  10. 2023Learning Robot Manipulation from Cross-Morphology Demonstrationcited by 8
  11. 2022TC-Driver: Trajectory Conditioned Driving for Robust Autonomous Racing -- A Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 6
  12. 2023Skill-Critic: Refining Learned Skills for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learningcited by 6
  13. 2022Learn-to-Race Challenge 2022: Benchmarking Safe Learning and Cross-domain Generalisation in Autonomous Racingcited by 4
  14. 2022Event Tables for Efficient Experience Replaycited by 4
  15. 2023Residual Policy Learning for Vehicle Control of Autonomous Racing Carscited by 4
  16. 2023Data-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vehicle Trajectory Controlcited by 4
  17. 2024Enhancing Reinforcement Learning Agents with Local Guidescited by 4
  18. 2025A Champion-level Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Competitive Racing in Gran Turismo 7cited by 4
  19. 2021Expert Human-Level Driving in Gran Turismo Sport Using Deep Reinforcement Learning with Image-based Representationcited by 3
  20. 2024BeTAIL: Behavior Transformer Adversarial Imitation Learning from Human Racing Gameplaycited by 3
  21. 2023Learning the References of Online Model Predictive Control for Urban Self-Drivingcited by 2
  22. 2023Quantifying Agent Interaction in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Cost-efficient Generalizationcited by 2
  23. 2023Development and Assessment of Autonomous Vehicles in Both Fully Automated and Mixed Traffic Conditionscited by 2
  24. 2025RLPP: A Residual Method for Zero-Shot Real-World Autonomous Racing on Scaled Platformscited by 2
  25. 2025Automated Reward Design for Gran Turismocited by 2
  26. 2021Autonomous Racing using a Hybrid Imitation-Reinforcement Learning Architecturecited by 1
  27. 2022Context-Dependent Anomaly Detection with Knowledge Graph Embedding Modelscited by 1
  28. 2023A Multiplicative Value Function for Safe and Efficient Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  29. 2023Composing Efficient, Robust Tests for Policy Selectioncited by 1
  30. 2023Partial End-to-end Reinforcement Learning for Robustness Against Modelling Error in Autonomous Racingcited by 1
  31. 2023Scalable Decentralized Cooperative Platoon using Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  32. 2024Mixed-Reality Digital Twins: Leveraging the Physical and Virtual Worlds for Hybrid Sim2Real Transition of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Policiescited by 1
  33. 2024Learning Autonomous Race Driving with Action Mapping Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  34. 2024A Benchmark Environment for Offline Reinforcement Learning in Racing Gamescited by 1
  35. 2025Vision based driving agent for race car simulation environmentscited by 1
  36. 2025Self-correcting Reward Shaping via Language Models for Reinforcement Learning Agents in Gamescited by 1
  37. 2022An Adaptive Human Driver Model for Realistic Race Car Simulationscited by 0
  38. 2022Meta-Reinforcement Learning Using Model Parameterscited by 0

50 most cited of 60 All 60 (JSON)