{"paper":{"title":"Reward-Conditioned Attention: How Reward Design Shapes What Autonomous Driving Agents See","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","math.OC"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Ahmed Djalal Hacini, Aissa Boulmerka, Mohamed Benabdelouahad, Nadir Farhi","submitted_at":"2026-06-23T20:02:51Z","abstract_excerpt":"We investigate how reward design shapes the internal attention patterns of reinforcement learning agents trained for autonomous driving. Using three Perceiver-based agents that share identical architectures and training data but differ only in their reward configurations$\\unicode{x2014}$ranging from basic violation penalties to continuous proximity penalties$\\unicode{x2014}$we analyze cross-attention allocation across 50 real-world scenarios from the Waymo Open Motion Dataset. A central methodological finding is that na\\\"ive pooling of timesteps across episodes substantially underestimates the"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.25127","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.25127/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}