Abstract
Data-driven driving simulators command accelerations and steering rates from a fixed grid without constraining the realized accelerations and jerks. As a result, reinforcement-learning policies inflate safety metrics through abrupt, last-second maneuvers that lie far outside the range of human driving and would be unacceptable to occupants of a real vehicle, so the metrics measure simulator permissiveness rather than policy quality. Enforcing comfort bounds naively is not enough: lateral limits shrink quadratically with speed, so clamping a static grid saturates it and destroys fine-grained control ("grid collapse"). We propose an adaptive action parameterization that rediscretizes the grid at every step to span exactly the per-step feasible control set, via closed-form inversion of the lateral-jerk constraint. We further present PufferDrive-Editor, a browser-based tool to audit realized kinematics and author kinematically challenging scenes. On the Waymo Open Motion Dataset and a hand-authored slalom, our adaptive model holds comfort violations below 1% while outperforming clipped-grid and direct-jerk baselines in navigability.
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Cite this article
APA 7
Rothenhäusler, A., Jost, D., Rajan, R., Janjos, F., Scheel, O., Look, A., & Boedecker, J. (2026). Comfort by Construction: Adaptive, Comfort-Bounded Action Spaces for Learned Driving Policies. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/comfort-by-construction-adaptive-comfort-bounded-action-spaces-for-learned-driving-policies
MLA 9
Rothenhäusler, Anna, et al. "Comfort by Construction: Adaptive, Comfort-Bounded Action Spaces for Learned Driving Policies." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/comfort-by-construction-adaptive-comfort-bounded-action-spaces-for-learned-driving-policies.
Chicago (author–date)
Rothenhäusler, Anna, Daniel Jost, Raghu Rajan, Faris Janjos, Oliver Scheel, Andreas Look, and Joschka Boedecker. 2026. "Comfort by Construction: Adaptive, Comfort-Bounded Action Spaces for Learned Driving Policies." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/comfort-by-construction-adaptive-comfort-bounded-action-spaces-for-learned-driving-policies.
Harvard
Rothenhäusler, A., Jost, D., Rajan, R., Janjos, F., Scheel, O., Look, A. and Boedecker, J. (2026) 'Comfort by Construction: Adaptive, Comfort-Bounded Action Spaces for Learned Driving Policies', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/comfort-by-construction-adaptive-comfort-bounded-action-spaces-for-learned-driving-policies.
Vancouver
Rothenhäusler A, Jost D, Rajan R, Janjos F, Scheel O, Look A, et al. Comfort by Construction: Adaptive, Comfort-Bounded Action Spaces for Learned Driving Policies. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/comfort-by-construction-adaptive-comfort-bounded-action-spaces-for-learned-driving-policies
IEEE
A. Rothenhäusler, D. Jost, R. Rajan, F. Janjos, O. Scheel, A. Look, and J. Boedecker, "Comfort by Construction: Adaptive, Comfort-Bounded Action Spaces for Learned Driving Policies," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/comfort-by-construction-adaptive-comfort-bounded-action-spaces-for-learned-driving-policies.