ParkingScenes: A Structured Dataset for End-to-End Autonomous Parking in Simulation Scenes
Authors: Haonan Chen, Kaiwen Xiao, Bin Tian, Jun Fu
Organizations: Institute of Automation · Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing, China · School of Art and Design · Yanshan University · Hebei, China
Abstract
Autonomous parking remains a critical yet challenging task in intelligent driving systems, particularly within constrained urban environments where maneuvering space is limited and precise control is essential. While recent advances in end-to-end learning have shown great promise, the lack of high-quality, structured datasets tailored for parking scenarios remains a significant bottleneck.To address this gap, we present ParkingScenes, a comprehensive multimodal dataset specifically designed for end-to-end autonomous parking in simulated scenes. Built on the CARLA simulator, ParkingScenes features structured parking trajectories generated by a Hybrid A* planner and a Model Predictive Controller (MPC), providing accurate and reproducible supervision signals. The dataset includes 16 reverse-in and 6 parallel parking scenarios, each executed under two pedestrian conditions (present and absent), resulting in 704 structured episodes and approximately 105000 frames. Each scenario is repeated 16 times to ensure consistent coverage. Each frame contains synchronized data from four RGB cameras, four depth sensors, vehicle motion states, and Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representations, enabling rich multimodal fusion and context-aware learning. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset, we compare models trained on ParkingScenes with those trained on unstructured, manually collected simulation data under identical conditions. Results show significant improvements in performance, underscoring the effectiveness of structured supervision for robust and accurate parking policy learning. By releasing both the dataset and the collection framework, ParkingScenes establishes a scalable and reproducible benchmark for advancing learning-based autonomous parking systems. The dataset and collection framework will be released at: https://github.com/haonan-ai/ParkingScenes
Autonomous parking demands precise low-speed maneuvering within narrow, cluttered, and highly constrained environments, where vehicles must navigate tight spaces while avoiding static obstacles and complex geometric boundaries. Unlike imitation learning, which typically requires massive volumes of high-quality expert demonstrations to converge to a stable policy and often suffers from limited generalization to unseen scenarios, traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods face persistent challenges including excessive training overhead, inefficient exploration, and even failure to learn viable parking strategies in challenging settings. To address these limitations, this paper presents a correction-in-the-loop sample-efficient reinforcement learning (CIL-SERL) framework for end-to-end autonomous parking, which is entirely trained in a photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) parking simulator that enables high-fidelity digital reconstruction of real-world scenes. Inspired by error-correction notebooks used in learning practice, we design a novel multi-level replay buffer mechanism. These buffers hierarchically organize and store standard RL rollouts, human corrective interventions, failed exploration trajectories, and rollback-based correction segments in separate yet interconnected memory regions, facilitating structured sampling and targeted learning during training. The proposed framework is systematically evaluated in both the 3DGS simulation environment and a physical vehicle platform. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves substantial improvements in parking success rate, operational efficiency, and safety performance across diverse scenarios, validating the effectiveness and practical applicability of the proposed CIL-SERL-based end-to-end autonomous parking solution.
In recent years, autonomous parking has made significant advances, yet parking tasks still face challenges in extreme scenarios such as mechanical and dead-end parking slots, often resulting in failures. This is mainly due to traditional parking methods adopting a multistage approach, lacking the ability to optimize the parking problem as a whole. End-to-end methods enable joint optimization across perception and planning modules to eliminate the accumulation of errors, enhancing algorithm performance in extreme scenarios. Although several end-to-end parking methods use imitation or reinforcement learning, the former is limited by data cost and distribution coverage, while the latter suffers from inefficient exploration. To address these challenges, we propose a Reinforcement learning End-to-end Autonomous Parking method (REAP). REAP employs Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) within an asymmetric reinforcement learning framework to improve training efficiency and inference performance. To accelerate model convergence, we distill the capabilities of a rule-based planner into the end-to-end network through behavior cloning. We further introduce a soft predictive collision penalty mechanism to reduce collision rates by penalizing obstacle-approaching actions. To ensure that the trained reinforcement learning network can directly transfer to real-world scenarios, we have established a Real2Sim2Real simulator. In the Real2Sim step, we use 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to transform real-world scenes into digital scenes. In the Sim2Real step, we deploy the end-to-end model onto the vehicle to bridge the Sim2Real gap. Trained in the 3DGS simulator and deployed on physical vehicles, REAP successfully parks in various types of parking spaces, especially demonstrating the feasibility of end-to-end RL parking in extremely narrow mechanical slots.
Parking is a routine yet safety-critical task for autonomous vehicles operating in urban environments. However, cluttered and weakly structured parking spaces, compounded by the interactive uncertainty from surrounding vehicles, hinder reliable maneuver generation. To address these challenges, we develop a waypoint-level offline reinforcement learning framework for interaction-aware autonomous parking. Specifically, a dedicated parking dataset is constructed from hierarchical expert rollouts with rotational waypoint augmentation, covering both non-interactive scenarios and interactive ones. The policy is then conditioned on a compact state representation, in which LiDAR-based obstacle features are adapted to the target pose via feature-wise linear modulation. A state-conditioned tokenizer further quantizes continuous waypoint sequences into discrete action tokens, over which conservative Q-learning is performed to suppress value overestimation on poorly supported actions. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted in the high-fidelity CARLA simulator. The proposed framework attains the highest parking success rate among all baselines and transfers reliably to unseen parking slots.