Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: Lecture Slides | Igl's Blog
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Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: Lecture Slides

Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: Lecture Slides

September 14, 2026
1 min read

These are the slides of my two-part lecture on reinforcement learning for autonomous driving at the ELLIS Summer School on Autonomous Driving, Barcelona. Both decks are interactive Reveal.js presentations:

  • Arrow keys or hjkl to move between slides
  • F for full screen
  • Esc or O for an overview.

Part 1: RL background

Quick overview over the RL foundations:

  • Why do we need RL: covariate shift and its experimental evidence.
  • From first principles to PPO and GRPO, including brief intros to value functions and GAE.
  • An overview over the broader RL landscape: exploration, offline RL, model-based RL and POMDPs.
  • What makes RL powerful and fragile: the data moves with the policy.

Open Part 1: RL background

Part 2: The research frontier of RL for Autonomous Driving

Mostly structured as Problem -> Existing Solutions -> Examples, including topics such as:

  • Reward design
  • Sim2Real gaps
  • Traffic modelling
  • Challenges of RL for E2E driving
  • Imitation-to-RL gaps

Open Part 2: The research frontier

The decks are rendered with Quarto.