XAI-Guided Fourier Domain Generalisation for Pure-Simulation Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning has shown strong potential for vision-based autonomous driving, but policies trained in simulation often suffer severe performance degradation when deployed in the real world. Existing sim-to-real methods commonly address this gap through image-transfer-based domain adaptation or policy-agnostic domain randomisation. However, the former requires laborious acquisition of target-domain data and is often limited to the deployment domain, whereas the latter introduces unguided perturbations that may not reflect the underlying sim-to-real discrepancy, leading to suboptimal transfer performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose XFD, an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)-guided Fourier domain generalisation framework for pure-simulation sim-to-real reinforcement learning. The proposed framework extracts explainability attribution maps from simulated observations, and converts these attributions into policy-conditioned Fourier-domain interventions. By perturbing appearance-sensitive spectral components while preserving task-defining spatial structures, XFD constructs robustness-enhancing visual domains entirely within simulation. Subsequently, the proposed robust policy optimisation guides the policy towards attending to task-critical features while suppressing sensitivity to irrelevant visual information. Extensive experiments in simulation and zero-shot real-world deployment demonstrate that XFD consistently improves traveled distance and reward over standard policy and randomly domain-randomised baseline, especially on unseen maps with cluttered backgrounds. Attribution-based analysis further proves that the proposed policy preserves more consistent task-relevant visual evidence across simulation and real-world observations.