New preprint: TreeIRL combines search with ML for safe and human-like autonomous driving in the real world

New preprint from our autonomy research area!

TreeIRL is a novel planner that combines classical search with learning-based methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance in simulation and in real-world autonomous driving! ๐Ÿš˜ ๐Ÿค– ๐Ÿš€

๐Ÿ’ก The key idea is to use Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) to find a promising set of safe candidate trajectories and inverse reinforcement learning to choose the most human-like trajectory among them.

Why this matters:

๐Ÿ›ฃ๏ธ First real-world evaluation of MCTS-based planner on public roads.

๐Ÿ“Š Comprehensive comparison across simulation and 500+ miles of urban driving in Las Vegas.

๐Ÿ† Outperforms classical + SOTA planners, balancing safety, progress, comfort, and human-likeness.

๐Ÿงฉ Flexible framework that can be extended with imitation learning and reinforcement learning.

โ€ผ๏ธ Underscores importance of diverse metrics and real-world evaluation.

–> read more about it here.

#AI #Robotics #MachineLearning #SelfDrivingCars #AutonomousVehicles #MotionPlanning

September 2025 · Momchil Tomov

Patch foraging paper accepted to Neuron

๐Ÿญ๐Ÿ”โšก๐Ÿง  Our paper studying the neural substrates of patch foraging decisions – whether to stay on a patch or leave it for a more promising one – was accepted to Neuron!

July 2025 · Momchil Tomov

Paper on policy reuse published in PLOS Biology

๐Ÿง  Our paper studying how the brain reuses strategies from previous tasks to solve novel tasks was published in PLOS Biology. This follows up on our previous work on multi-task reinforcement learning in humans, where we first reported behavioral evidence for such policy reuse.

June 2025 · Momchil Tomov

Lab2Car paper accepted to ICRA 2025

๐Ÿš— Excited to share that our Lab2Car paper was accepted to ICRA 2025! See you in Atlatna!