# Efficient Learning of Urban Driving Policies Using Bird's-Eye-View State Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19904 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19904/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 19 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Reinforcement learning for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/reinforcement-learning-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02438/) (2015)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [Learning to Drive in a Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00412/) (2018)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14024/) (2022)
- [Learning from All Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11934/) (2022)
- [Interpretable End-to-end Urban Autonomous Driving with Latent Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08726/) (2020)
- [Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning for Urban Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09503/) (2019)
- [Deep Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving in Generic Urban Scenarios with Enhanced Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00640/) (2019)
- [Bird's-Eye-View Panoptic Segmentation Using Monocular Frontal View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03227/) (2021)
- [SkyEye: Self-Supervised Bird's-Eye-View Semantic Mapping Using Monocular Frontal View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04233/) (2023)
- [Learning and Aggregating Lane Graphs for Urban Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06175/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving Perception with Sequential Latent Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12464/) (2020)
- [Modeling Interactions of Autonomous Vehicles and Pedestrians with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Collision Avoidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15266/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BEVCar: Camera-Radar Fusion for BEV Map and Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11761/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving in the CARLA Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08221/) (2025)
- [Impoola: The Power of Average Pooling for Image-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05546/) (2025)
- [Learning Lane Graphs from Aerial Imagery Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05687/) (2024)
- [Effort-Based Criticality Metrics for Evaluating 3D Perception Errors in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28029/) (2026)
- [Higher Resolution, Better Generalization: Unlocking Visual Scaling in Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10546/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving involves complex decision-making in highly interactive environments, requiring thoughtful negotiation with other traffic participants. While reinforcement learning provides a way to learn such interaction behavior, efficient learning critically depends on scalable state representations. Contrary to imitation learning methods, high-dimensional state representations still constitute a major bottleneck for deep reinforcement learning methods in autonomous driving. In this paper, we study the challenges of constructing bird's-eye-view representations for autonomous driving and propose a recurrent learning architecture for long-horizon driving. Our PPO-based approach, called RecurrDriveNet, is demonstrated on a simulated autonomous driving task in CARLA, where it outperforms traditional frame-stacking methods while only requiring one million experiences for efficient training. RecurrDriveNet causes less than one infraction per driven kilometer by interacting safely with other road users.