DecoupleGS: Interactive 3D Gaussian Splatting for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Testing
Authors: Siying Li, Ying Ni, Jie Sun, Jian Sun, Haotian Shi
Organizations: College of Transportation, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China · Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering, Ministry of Education, Shanghai 201804, China · Key Laboratory of Roadand Traffic Engineering, Ministry of Education, Shanghai 201804, China
Abstract
End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving algorithms require rigorous closed-loop validation in simulation environments offering high visual fidelity, strong interactivity, and real-time performance. Existing approaches, from game engines to static neural rendering, inherently trade off these requirements and struggle with the dynamic scene composition essential for E2E testing. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel decoupled 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework tailored for large-scale E2E evaluation. We fundamentally decompose scenes into a high-fidelity static background and manipulable dynamic agents using an object-centric canonical representation. To resolve resulting representational conflicts, we introduce three targeted modules: (1) asset compression via perceptual pruning and vector quantization for real-time traffic rendering; (2) map-guided geometric registration leveraging semantic topology to strictly align trajectories; and (3) proxy-based relighting transferring ambient illumination for seamless photometric integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DecoupleGS achieves a balanced fidelity-efficiency trade-off, improves metric and photometric consistency, and provides a practical closed-loop sensor simulation platform for E2E autonomous driving evaluation.
The perception of an Autonomous Driving System (ADS) critically depends on relevant, comprehensive, and diverse datasets to ensure its safety while operating in the environment. Field data collection lacks completeness with respect to the list of rare but still possible safety-related scenarios needed for the development, verification, and validation of the ADS. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown promising capabilities for the reconstruction and editing of scenes based on data collected by cameras and LiDAR sensors. However, the industrial fidelity evaluation of reconstructions is underexplored, which is crucial when employing such methods in safety-related systems, especially for ADS. This becomes more challenging as ADS operates in a dynamic, uncontrolled environment with limited viewpoints and often partially occluded objects. This paper addresses this gap by proposing and implementing a framework (Fig. 1) to systematically analyze the capabilities and limitations of 3DGS for use in the reconstruction of safety-related scenes. It focuses on the quality of reconstruction for vehicles and pedestrians, which are the two most critical object classes for ADS. Our findings provide industry insights into the fidelity degradation of reconstructions from multiple novel viewpoints, both lateral and longitudinal, enabling the integration of these methods into real-world industrial AD software development and testing pipelines.
Reliable autonomous driving relies on large-scale, well-labeled data and robust models. However, manual data collection is resource-intensive, and traditional simulation suffers from a persistent reality gap. While recent generative frameworks and radiance-field methods improve visual fidelity, they still struggle with temporal and spatial consistency and cannot ensure physics-aware behavior, limiting their applicability to driving scenario generation. To address these challenges, we propose Real2Sim, an unified framework that combines 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) with a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) solver. Real2Sim explicitly reconstructs dynamic driving scenes as temporally continuous Gaussian primitives, supports instance-level editing, and simulates realistic object-object and object-environment interactions. This framework enables physics-aware, high-fidelity synthesis of diverse, editable scenarios, including challenging corner cases such as collisions and post-impact trajectories. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset validate Real2Sim's capabilities in rendering, reconstruction, editing, and physics simulation, demonstrating its potential as a scalable tool for data generation in downstream tasks such as perception, tracking, trajectory prediction, and end-to-end policy learning.
3D simulation platforms are critical for autonomous driving because they enable end-to-end policy evaluation, thereby reducing development costs and improving safety. In recent years, neural simulation has become predominant, with methods such as NuRec playing a central role; however, these methods remain relatively slow and typically require per-scene tuning. In this work, we present Instant NuRec, a feed-forward neural reconstruction model that turns a short multi-view driving log into a fully simulatable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) world in a single forward pass. The model accepts multi-view input from a calibrated camera rig and emits a layered output consisting of static and dynamic 3DGS layers, a sky cubemap, and per-camera ISP corrections, while providing native support for non-pinhole camera models via 3DGUT. It reconstructs a 10-20-second multi-camera scene in roughly 1.5 seconds and achieves a PSNR on the Waymo Open Dataset that is 2.01 dB above the strongest evaluated baseline. Instant NuRec is deeply integrated into NuRec and is compatible with AlpaSim for closed-loop simulation.