LORD: Large Models based Opposite Reward Design for Autonomous Driving

Abstract: 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.