OEL-AD: An Online Evolutive Learning Framework for Cross-Region Adaptive Autonomous Driving

End-to-End autonomous driving (E2E-AD) systems face challenges in lifelong learning, including catastrophic forgetting, difficulty in knowledge transfer across diverse scenarios, and spurious correlations between unobservable confounders and true driving intents. To address these issues, we propose DeLL, a Deconfounded Lifelong Learning framework that integrates a Dirichlet process mixture model (DPMM) with the front-door adjustment mechanism from causal inference. The DPMM is employed to construct two dynamic knowledge spaces: a trajectory knowledge space for clustering explicit driving behaviors and an implicit feature knowledge space for discovering latent driving abilities. Leveraging the non-parametric Bayesian nature of DPMM, our framework enables adaptive expansion and incremental updating of knowledge without predefining the number of clusters, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, the front-door adjustment mechanism utilizes the DPMM-derived knowledge as mediators to deconfound spurious correlations, such as those induced by sensor noise or environmental changes, and enhances the causal expressiveness of the learned representations. Additionally, we introduce an evolutionary trajectory decoder that enables non-autoregressive planning. To evaluate the lifelong learning performance of E2E-AD, we propose new evaluation protocols and metrics based on Bench2Drive. Extensive evaluations in the closed-loop CARLA simulator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves adaptability to new driving scenarios and overall driving performance, while effectively retaining previously acquired knowledge. Code: https://github.com/Mooncakebro/DeLL

Effective environment modeling is the foundation for autonomous driving, underpinning tasks from perception to planning. However, current paradigms often inadequately consider the feedback of ego motion to the observation, which leads to an incomplete understanding of the driving process and consequently limits the planning capability. To address this issue, we introduce a novel ego-scene interactive modeling paradigm. Inspired by human recognition, the paradigm represents ego-scene interaction as the scene flow relative to the ego-vehicle. This conceptualization allows for modeling ego-motion feedback within a feature learning pattern, advantageously utilizing existing log-replay datasets rather than relying on scenario simulations. We specifically propose FlowAD, a general flow-based framework for autonomous driving. Within it, an ego-guided scene partition first constructs basic flow units to quantify scene flow. The ego-vehicle's forward direction and steering velocity directly shape the partition, which reflects ego motion. Then, based on flow units, spatial and temporal flow predictions are performed to model dynamics of scene flow, encompassing both spatial displacement and temporal variation. The final task-aware enhancement exploits learned spatio-temporal flow dynamics to benefit diverse tasks through object and region-level strategies. We also propose a novel Frames before Correct Planning (FCP) metric to assess the scene understanding capability. Experiments in both open and closed-loop evaluations demonstrate FlowAD's generality and effectiveness across perception, end-to-end planning, and VLM analysis. Notably, FlowAD reduces 19% collision rate over SparseDrive with FCP improvements of 1.39 frames (60%) on nuScenes, and achieves an impressive driving score of 51.77 on Bench2Drive, proving the superiority. Code, model, and configurations will be released here.

End-to-end autonomous driving planners typically generate trajectories from current observations alone. However, real-world driving is highly dynamic, and such reactive planning cannot anticipate future scene evolution, often leading to myopic decisions and safety-critical failures. We propose ProDrive, a world-model-based proactive planning framework that enables ego-environment co-evolution for autonomous driving. ProDrive jointly trains a query-centric trajectory planner and a bird's-eye-view (BEV) world model end-to-end: the planner generates diverse candidate trajectories and planning-aware ego tokens, while the world model predicts future scene evolution conditioned on them. By injecting planner features into the world model and evaluating all candidates in parallel, ProDrive preserves end-to-end gradient flow and allows future outcome assessment to directly shape planning. This bidirectional coupling enables proactive planning beyond current-observation-driven decision-making. Experiments on NAVSIM v1 show that ProDrive outperforms strong baselines in both safety and planning efficiency, while ablations validate the effectiveness of the proposed ego-environment coupling design.