SUPR
REvolve: Reward Evolution with Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving
Dnr:

NAISS 2024/22-1121

Type:

NAISS Small Compute

Principal Investigator:

Alkis Sygkounas

Affiliation:

Örebro universitet

Start Date:

2024-08-30

End Date:

2024-12-01

Primary Classification:

10201: Computer Sciences

Webpage:

Allocation

Abstract

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify explicitly. In recent works, large language models (LLMs) have been used for reward generation from natural language task descriptions, leveraging their extensive instruction tuning and commonsense understanding of human behavior. In this work, we hypothesize that LLMs, guided by human feedback, can be used to formulate \textit{human-aligned} reward functions. Specifically, we study this in the challenging setting of autonomous driving (AD), wherein notions of "good" driving are tacit and hard to quantify. To this end, we introduce \rewolve, an evolutionary framework that uses LLMs for reward design in AD. \rewolve creates and refines reward functions by utilizing human feedback to guide the evolution process, effectively translating implicit human knowledge into explicit reward functions for training (deep) RL agents. We demonstrate that agents trained on \rewolve-designed rewards align closely with human driving standards, thereby outperforming other state-of-the-art baselines.