Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play
Abstract
Self-play has powered breakthroughs in two-player and multi-player games. Here we show that self-play is a surprisingly effective strategy in another domain. We show that robust and naturalistic driving emerges entirely from self-play in simulation at unprecedented scale – 1.6 billion km of driving. This is enabled by Gigaflow, a batched simulator that can synthesize and train on 42 years of subjective driving experience per hour on a single 8-GPU node. The resulting policy achieves state-of-the-art performance on three independent autonomous driving benchmarks. The policy outperforms the prior state of the art when tested on recorded real-world scenarios, amidst human drivers, without ever seeing human data during training. The policy is realistic when assessed against human references and achieves unprecedented robustness, averaging 17.5 years of continuous driving between incidents in simulation.
Cite
Text
Cusumano-Towner et al. "Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play." Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025.Markdown
[Cusumano-Towner et al. "Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play." Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/icml/2025/cusumanotowner2025icml-robust/)BibTeX
@inproceedings{cusumanotowner2025icml-robust,
title = {{Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play}},
author = {Cusumano-Towner, Marco and Hafner, David and Hertzberg, Alexander and Huval, Brody and Petrenko, Aleksei and Vinitsky, Eugene and Wijmans, Erik and Killian, Taylor W. and Bowers, Stuart and Sener, Ozan and Kraehenbuehl, Philipp and Koltun, Vladlen},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning},
year = {2025},
pages = {11710-11737},
volume = {267},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/icml/2025/cusumanotowner2025icml-robust/}
}