Mastering aerial confrontation through model-based reinforcement learning

Achieving full autonomy in within-visual-range (WVR) autonomous aerial confrontation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) with a single, end-to-end learning policy is a formidable challenge, where agents must navigate stochastic dynamics and sparse rewards to master the delicate trade-off between aggression and survival. We introduce a model-based reinforcement learning agent that combines the Dreamer framework with safety-aware objectives to tackle this. To enhance learning stability and foresight in this demanding domain, we augment Dreamer’s world model with an InfoNCE loss for long-range dependencies, categorical predictors to robustly model outcomes, Dyna-style actor-critic updates to ground the policy, and a Lipschitz regularizer to constrain value error. Furthermore, our framework integrates a population-based self-play pipeline with curriculum initialization, enabling rapid strategic discovery without expert priors. To validate our approach, we conducted evaluations in a high-fidelity 6-DoF simulation, where our agent demonstrated superior zero-shot performance, significantly higher sample efficiency than model-free baselines, and rapid fine-tuning against novel opponents, highlighting a viable path toward deployable autonomous agents.