Abstract
Camera-first autonomous-driving models predict future ego waypoints from images, ego-state features, and route commands, but waypoint supervision alone does not explicitly supervise actor-level representations of nearby road users. We study this as supervised representation learning for open-loop waypoint prediction. The deployable model uses multi-view RGB, ego state, and route command at inference. During training, simulator-derived sidecar labels supervise actor grounding, privileged hindsight actor relevance relative to the logged ego trajectory, and selected-actor short-horizon motion; these labels are never inference inputs. We evaluate route-disjoint splits with matched architecture, optimizer, validation criterion, checkpoint selection, and three seeds. A plain waypoint-only RGB baseline obtains 1.815±0.02 m final displacement error (FDE), and the matched no-teacher non-sidecar RGB control obtains 1.716±0.02 m. Road-user sidecar supervision (RU-sidecar) reduces FDE to 1.223±0.01 m, a 32.6% reduction over the plain baseline and 28.7% over the matched no-teacher non-sidecar RGB control. It improves over the plain baseline on 1445/1494 routes and over the matched no-teacher non-sidecar RGB control on 1417/1494 routes. Actor-conditioned slices show gains in all nonempty subsets, including 29.1% reduction for samples with at least four valid sidecar actors and 30.0% when a vulnerable road user is present. Optional simulator-state teacher alignment reaches 1.186±0.15 m FDE, but higher seed variability makes it secondary. Non-deployable simulator-state diagnostics remain stronger, indicating a privileged-to-camera gap. The evidence is limited to open-loop simulation diagnostics.
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Jul 1, 2026cs.CV
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Sviatoslav Voloshyn, Bruno K. W. Martens, Wangxin Liu +2
Jul 17, 2026cs.CV
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