Although recent trajectory prediction and end-to-end autonomous driving methods improve robustness in urban environments, they still lack meaningful controllability. Existing benchmarks either provide no persona-conditioned annotations or support only a single urgency spectrum (i.e., emergency, normal, relaxed), which cannot distinguish personas that share the same urgency level but require different driving dynamics. To address this, we propose (i) the Persona-Conditioned Trajectory (PCT) dataset, which decomposes driving personas along two axes, Temporal Urgency and Ride Comfort, and combines three levels of each to form a grid of nine personas, each paired with natural-language descriptions and trajectories, and (ii) PersonaDrive, a framework that can learn driving personas from language and can generate persona-specific trajectories. PersonaDrive incorporates Persona-Conditioned Anchor Transform (PCAT), which hierarchically reshapes anchors along both axes, and Persona-Conditioned Multi-Modal Fusion (PCMF) for BEV-level persona fusion. Training is supervised by a Hierarchical Guide Loss enforcing axis-aligned physical orderings and an Axis-Decomposed Diversity Loss preventing diagonal mode collapse. Experimental results show that PersonaDrive consistently improves over the compared baselines across multi-dimensional scenarios. The code and PCT dataset are available at https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/PersonaDrive
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Conceptual comparison of (a) existing trajectory predictors, which output a single persona-agnostic plan, (b) one-dimensional persona methods conditioned on a single urgency axis, and (c) our PersonaDrive, which conditions on natural-language persona descriptions spanning Temporal Urgency and Ride Comfort, yielding nine distinct driving personas.
Figure 2: Four-stage generation and validation pipeline for the PCT dataset. Stage 1 generates five candidate sets of nine trajectory parameters via GPT-4o-mini and selects the best through voting. Stages 2 and 3 run in parallel: rule-based validation checks dynamic bounds, lane compliance, progress ordering, and pairwise diversity, while GPT-4o evaluates trajectory quality and verifies persona consistency. Samples failing either stage are regenerated in Stage 4, where failure context is injected into the prompt.
Figure 3: Multi-dimensional behavioral profiles of the nine personas. (a) With urgency fixed, longitudinal metrics (speed, distance) separate by urgency level while comfort lines overlap. (b) With comfort fixed, handling metrics (jerk, yaw rate) separate by comfort level while urgency lines overlap. This confirms that the two axes control orthogonal aspects of driving behavior.
Comf. Low
Comf. Mid
Comf. High
Urg. High
89.9
89.9
92.2
Urg. Mid
98.4
82.2
82.9
Urg. Low
94.6
73.6
67.4
Table 1: Persona distinguishability of the PCT dataset. Each cell reports the accuracy (%) for identifying the correct persona from shuffled trajectory–text pairs.
Figure 4: Overall architecture of the proposed PersonaDrive framework. PCAT modulates the anchor bank along the urgency and comfort axes using scalars derived from the text query. PCMF fuses BEV, ego, persona, and transformed anchor queries to produce persona-aware trajectories. Training is supervised by a Hierarchical Guide Loss and an Axis-Decomposed Diversity Loss. ⊗ denotes element-wise multiplication.
Figure 5: Illustration of the PCMF module. (a) Query Prototype Pool compresses Qbev into a conditional vector C . (b) Conditional Resampler modulates learnable slots with C and resamples each source. (c) Source Gate applies persona-dependent gating, and the PCMF fuser combines the resulting slots with BEV features.
Methods
Avg. ADE ↓
Avg. FDE ↓
Avg. PDMS ↑
LTF (TPAMI’22) [ 9 ]
2.49
3.87
52.0
Transfuser (TPAMI’22) [ 9 ]
2.53
3.96
51.9
UniAD (CVPR’23) [ 18 ]
2.47
3.83
52.5
Hydra-MDP (arXiv’24) [ 30 ]
6.70
11.85
41.4
PARA-Drive (CVPR’24) [ 54 ]
4.84
9.00
51.9
Traj-LLM (T-IV’24) [ 26 ]
2.66
4.20
54.1
Table 2: Comparison of closed-loop metrics on the planning-oriented NAVSIM navtest split. We report Avg. ADE, Avg. FDE, and Avg. PDMS averaged across all nine persona categories. Bold / underlined fonts indicate the best/second-best results.
Method
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
1D-Urg.
ADE ↓
3.30
2.96
3.07
2.76
2.35
2.35
2.73
1.93
2.56
2.67
1D-Comf.
4.79
4.85
4.66
2.43
2.35
2.34
5.70
6.26
7.11
4.50
Multi-D
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
1D-Urg.
FDE ↓
5.81
5.15
5.42
4.14
3.52
3.53
4.06
2.63
4.21
4.27
1D-Comf.
11.76
11.40
10.32
3.69
3.52
3.50
9.84
10.88
12.87
8.64
Multi-D
5.25
5.15
4.47
3.69
3.52
3.50
2.82
2.63
2.33
3.71
Table 3: One-dimensional vs. multi-dimensional persona conditioning on the NAVSIM navtest split. Multi-D is our full model. 1D-Urg. uses the mid-comfort (CM) prediction for all cells in the same urgency row; 1D-Comf. uses the mid-urgency (UM) prediction for all cells in the same comfort column. Bold indicates the best result per cell.
PCAT
PCMF
LAD
Avg. ADE ↓
Avg. FDE ↓
Avg. PDMS ↑
-
-
-
3.93
5.79
55.3
✓
-
-
3.52
5.43
56.0
✓
✓
-
3.23
4.85
56.9
-
✓
✓
2.55
3.87
57.2
✓
-
✓
2.61
3.97
57.5
✓
✓
✓
2.39
3.71
57.7
Table 4: Effect of our proposed components on the NAVSIM navtest split. All metrics are averaged across all nine persona categories. All variants include the text encoder. Detailed per-persona results are in the supplementary material.
Text Encoders
Avg. ADE ↓
Avg. FDE ↓
Avg. PDMS ↑
DeBERTa [ 17 ]
5.99
11.56
57.1
RoBERTa [ 37 ]
4.72
8.76
62.0
MiniLM [ 51 ]
2.39
3.71
57.7
Table 5: Comparison of different text encoders on the NAVSIM navtest split. We report Avg. ADE, Avg. FDE, and Avg. PDMS averaged across all nine persona categories. Detailed per-persona results are in the supplementary material.
Methods
Avg. ADE ↓
Avg. FDE ↓
Avg. PDMS ↑
DiffusionDrive (One-Hot) [ 33 ]
2.67
4.20
55.6
PersonaDrive (One-Hot)
2.54
4.01
56.6
PersonaDrive (Text)
2.39
3.71
57.7
Table 6: Comparison of one-hot persona encoding and text-based persona description on the NAVSIM navtest split. We report Avg. ADE, Avg. FDE, and Avg. PDMS for DiffusionDrive with one-hot labels and our framework with one-hot and text-based persona inputs, averaged across all nine persona categories. More results are in the supplementary material.
Figure 6: Qualitative results on the NAVSIM dataset. (a) Predicted trajectories under nine personas spanning the Urgency and Comfort axes. (b) Corresponding natural-language persona descriptions used as text input for each cell of the 3×3 grid. Each cell shows the ground-truth persona trajectory (waypoints highlighted in yellow) for one Urgency×Comfort persona.
Figure S.1 : Human evaluation interface for the PCT dataset. For each scene, annotators view a 3×3 grid of BEV images, each displaying one persona-conditioned ground-truth trajectory, alongside the corresponding persona descriptions. Annotators rate fifteen Likert-scale items on trajectory quality (urgency ordering, comfort ordering, smoothness, safety, and overall diversity) and text-persona clarity.
Question
Mean
Std
Median
Q1-1
4.84
0.46
5.0
Q1-2
4.76
0.55
5.0
Q1-3
4.83
0.43
5.0
Q1-4
4.64
0.50
5.0
Q1-5
4.64
0.62
5.0
Q1-6
4.75
0.66
5.0
Table S.1 : Summary of human evaluation scores for the PCT dataset. Ratings are on a five point Likert scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent).
Figure S.2 : Distribution comparison between OpenScene GT (dotted gray) and PCT persona trajectories. Top: urgency axis (average speed, maximum lateral acceleration). Bottom: comfort axis (average jerk, maximum yaw rate). The OpenScene GT falls between Mid and Low Urgency in longitudinal metrics, and between Mid and High Comfort in handling metrics, confirming that PCT trajectories bracket the real-world driving envelope.
Methods
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
LTF (TPAMI’22) [ 9 ]
ADE ↓
3.01
2.99
2.78
2.62
2.47
2.47
2.10
2.03
1.92
2.49
Transfuser (TPAMI’22) [ 9 ]
3.09
3.05
2.80
2.66
2.52
2.53
2.17
2.05
1.93
2.53
UniAD (CVPR’23) [ 18 ]
2.99
2.98
2.76
2.53
2.46
2.44
2.20
2.03
1.89
2.47
Hydra-MDP (arXiv’24) [ 30 ]
4.83
4.75
4.57
5.11
5.42
5.70
8.97
9.86
11.11
6.70
PARA-Drive (CVPR’24) [ 54 ]
5.05
4.74
4.32
3.16
2.99
3.01
5.78
6.60
7.88
4.84
DiffusionDrive (CVPR’25) [ 33 ]
4.47
4.47
4.27
4.05
3.95
3.91
3.54
3.43
3.28
3.93
Table S.2 : Per-persona comparison of closed-loop metrics on the NAVSIM navtest split. We report ADE and FDE for each of the nine persona categories. Bold indicates the best result per cell.
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Mean
NC ↑
66.9
74.6
80.6
85.3
91.2
91.8
86.3
93.1
91.0
84.5
DAC ↑
70.7
78.0
80.4
80.3
87.1
87.6
83.8
91.2
89.9
83.2
TTC ↑
49.9
56.9
62.4
75.1
83.7
84.9
76.0
84.3
85.0
73.1
Comf. ↑
45.8
55.9
69.6
79.3
80.9
82.3
84.0
76.6
63.0
70.8
EP ↑
43.8
56.1
62.7
61.0
70.1
69.5
48.9
52.4
41.9
56.3
PDMS ↑
35.2
47.0
54.4
59.6
71.1
71.7
56.7
65.1
58.3
57.7
Table S.3 : Per-persona decomposition of PDMS on the NAVSIM navtest split (higher is better). The multiplicative safety gates (NC/DAC/DDC) stay within a bounded floor even at the most against-the-grain cell (UH-CL), so the score does not collapse; the low aggregate PDMS there comes from the quality terms (Comfort, Ego-Progress) and speed-coupled TTC, reflecting an intended trade-off rather than degraded safety.
Metric
PCAT
PCMF
LAD
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
ADE ↓
-
-
-
4.47
4.47
4.27
4.05
3.95
3.91
3.54
3.43
3.28
3.93
✓
-
-
4.10
4.14
3.88
3.58
3.48
3.48
3.12
3.03
2.92
3.52
✓
✓
-
3.80
3.82
3.55
3.29
3.20
3.18
2.85
2.77
2.63
3.23
-
✓
✓
3.12
3.11
2.86
2.63
2.54
2.52
2.17
2.14
1.95
2.55
✓
-
✓
3.22
3.21
2.96
2.69
2.59
2.55
2.19
2.12
1.99
2.61
✓
✓
✓
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
Table S.4 : Effect of our proposed components on the NAVSIM navtest split. All metrics are averaged across all nine persona categories. All variants include the text encoder.
Models
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
DeBERTa [ 17 ]
ADE ↓
9.27
9.10
8.60
6.22
5.86
6.52
2.19
3.13
3.02
5.99
RoBERTa [ 37 ]
3.98
4.49
4.12
4.74
4.08
2.92
4.53
6.20
7.43
4.72
MiniLM [ 51 ]
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
DeBERTa [ 17 ]
FDE ↓
20.78
19.52
17.61
10.76
9.97
11.56
3.32
5.39
5.11
11.56
RoBERTa [ 37 ]
8.35
9.54
8.24
8.47
6.95
4.97
7.85
10.91
13.58
8.76
MiniLM [ 51 ]
5.25
5.15
4.47
3.69
3.52
3.50
2.82
2.63
2.33
3.71
Table S.5 : Comparison of different text encoders on the NAVSIM navtest split, with per-persona ADE and FDE reported across all nine persona categories.
Methods
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
DiffusionDrive (One-Hot) [ 33 ]
ADE ↓
3.32
3.29
3.03
2.71
2.65
2.59
2.24
2.16
2.03
2.67
PersonaDrive (One-Hot)
3.15
3.16
2.89
2.60
2.53
2.48
2.11
2.03
1.90
2.54
PersonaDrive (Text)
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
DiffusionDrive (One-Hot) [ 33 ]
FDE ↓
6.02
5.87
5.18
4.15
4.00
3.88
3.13
2.94
2.61
4.20
PersonaDrive (One-Hot)
5.66
5.60
4.87
3.98
3.86
3.76
3.01
2.83
2.52
4.01
PersonaDrive (Text)
5.25
5.15
4.47
3.69
3.52
3.50
2.82
2.63
2.33
3.71
Table S.6 : Comparison of one-hot persona encoding and text-based persona encoding on the NAVSIM navtest split. We report ADE and FDE for DiffusionDrive with one-hot labels and our framework with one-hot and text-based persona inputs, across all nine persona categories.
Methods
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
langTraj (ICCV’25) [ 4 ]
ADE ↓
3.64
3.35
3.17
2.93
2.46
2.47
2.37
2.09
2.01
2.72
iMotionLLM (WACV’26) [ 12 ]
3.44
3.51
3.33
2.97
2.94
2.88
2.37
2.29
2.15
2.87
PersonaDrive
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
langTraj (ICCV’25) [ 4 ]
FDE ↓
6.70
6.50
5.99
4.83
4.07
4.04
3.45
3.07
2.95
4.66
iMotionLLM (WACV’26) [ 12 ]
6.27
6.27
5.76
4.63
4.56
4.41
3.34
3.16
2.80
4.58
PersonaDrive
5.25
5.15
4.47
3.69
3.52
3.50
2.82
2.63
2.33
3.71
Table S.7 : Comparison with language-conditioned trajectory prediction methods on the NAVSIM navtest split. All methods use the same frozen MiniLM text encoder and persona descriptions. We report per-persona ADE and FDE across all nine persona categories.
Methods
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
1D-Urg.
ADE ↓
3.44
3.05
3.00
2.98
2.47
2.40
2.79
1.94
2.37
2.72
1D-Comf.
4.82
4.88
4.75
2.48
2.40
2.36
5.55
6.06
6.89
4.47
Multi-D
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
1D-Urg.
FDE ↓
6.37
5.43
5.11
4.62
3.77
3.59
4.26
2.65
3.84
4.40
1D-Comf.
11.91
11.53
10.61
3.75
3.60
3.51
9.48
10.48
12.37
8.58
Multi-D
5.25
5.15
4.47
3.69
3.52
3.50
2.82
2.63
2.33
3.71
Table S.8 : One-dimensional vs. multi-dimensional training on the NAVSIM navtest split. Multi-D is our full model. 1D-Urg. trains on the CM column only; 1D-Comf. trains on the UM row only; Multi-D trains on all nine personas jointly. We report per-persona ADE and FDE across all nine persona categories.
Metric
αu
αc
LGuide
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
ADE ↓
✓
-
-
3.28
3.25
2.97
2.80
2.64
2.63
2.26
2.20
2.05
2.68
✓
✓
-
3.24
3.29
3.05
2.75
2.66
2.61
2.23
2.15
2.03
2.67
✓
-
✓
3.02
3.05
2.79
2.49
2.41
2.40
2.05
2.01
1.88
2.46
✓
✓
✓
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
FDE ↓
✓
-
-
5.80
5.68
4.96
4.25
3.95
3.94
3.16
3.00
2.65
4.15
✓
✓
-
5.69
5.66
5.00
4.10
3.96
3.84
3.09
2.90
2.58
4.09
Table S.9 : Effect of PCAT components on the NAVSIM navtest split. We report ADE and FDE for configurations using only the urgency scalar αu , adding the comfort modulation αc , adding the guide loss, and using all three together, across all nine persona categories.
Figure S.3 : Effect of guide loss on persona-conditioned anchor trajectories. Each column shows anchor sets for three representative personas (high urgency, medium, and low urgency), and rows compare (a) PCAT without guide loss and (b) PCAT with guide loss, where the guide loss enforces a more consistent progress and smoothness ordering across personas.
Methods
Metric
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
Naive Concatenate
ADE ↓
3.79
3.79
3.69
3.46
3.68
3.38
3.08
2.94
2.77
3.40
Naive Cross-Attention
3.18
3.18
2.90
2.65
2.59
2.56
2.20
2.08
1.93
2.59
PCMF
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
Naive Concatenate
FDE ↓
6.44
6.33
5.94
5.17
5.49
4.94
4.30
4.05
3.60
5.14
Naive Cross-Attention
5.72
5.62
4.86
4.02
3.89
3.83
3.09
2.81
2.49
4.04
PCMF
5.25
5.15
4.47
3.69
3.52
3.50
2.82
2.63
2.33
3.71
Table S.10 : Comparison of text-scene fusion strategies on the NAVSIM navtest split. We report ADE and FDE for Naive Concatenate, Naive Cross-Attention, and the proposed PCMF, across all nine persona categories.
Metric
LIntra
LInter
UH-CL
UH-CM
UH-CH
UM-CL
UM-CM
UM-CH
UL-CL
UL-CM
UL-CH
Avg.
ADE ↓
✓
-
3.27
3.25
3.02
2.73
2.64
2.59
2.26
2.20
2.05
2.67
-
✓
3.27
3.26
2.99
2.72
2.60
2.56
2.22
2.11
2.00
2.64
✓
✓
2.98
2.96
2.69
2.43
2.35
2.34
2.02
1.93
1.82
2.39
FDE ↓
✓
-
5.75
5.63
4.95
4.10
3.92
3.83
3.12
2.95
2.64
4.10
-
✓
5.73
5.59
4.94
4.07
3.90
3.80
3.07
2.83
2.53
4.05
✓
✓
5.25
5.15
4.47
3.69
3.52
3.50
2.82
2.63
2.33
3.71
Table S.11 : Effect of diversity objective components on the NAVSIM navtest split. We report ADE and FDE for configurations using LIntra only, LInter only, and both losses together, across all nine persona categories.
Figure S.4 : Qualitative results of persona-conditioned trajectory prediction on the NAVSIM dataset. Each row shows one scene, and the 3×3 grid indicates predicted trajectories under nine personas spanning Urgency and Comfort. (a) and (b) show the predicted trajectories and the persona text inputs of PersonaDrive, respectively. Each cell shows the ground-truth persona trajectory (waypoints highlighted in yellow) for one Urgency×Comfort persona.
Figure S.5 : Representative failure cases and their recovered results. Each scene overlays the ground-truth trajectory (dashed gray), the initial failed generation (dashed red), and the recovered trajectory after failure-aware regeneration (solid green), where the specific failure reason is injected into the regeneration prompt. Over the full OpenScene generation, 31.4% of scenes were flagged for rule-based and 4.7% for quality-based (LLM-judge) regeneration; after up to three retries, 0.18% remained unrecovered and fell back to the best-scoring candidate.
Figure S.6 : Interpolation between UH-CL and UM-CL: (a) between cell embeddings, (b) between cell-defining prompts. Intermediate trajectories lie smoothly between the two cell predictions, showing that the model treats text as a continuous control signal rather than nine discrete labels.
Judge
Top-1
κ
Urgency
Comfort
Gemini Flash
82.6
0.804
90.2
90.6
Claude Opus
98.0
0.978
100.0
98.0
Table S.12 : Cross-family LLM-judge agreement with PCT cell labels on 1,000 samples (%). We report top-1 cell accuracy, Cohen’s κ , and per-axis accuracy.
Configuration
Avg. ADE ↓
Avg. FDE ↓
Avg. PDMS ↑
(a) KL temperature τ
τ=0.10
2.892
4.406
56.3
τ=0.25∗
2.391
3.706
57.7
τ=0.50
2.759
4.265
56.8
τ=1.00
2.772
4.274
57.4
(b) Inter-axis weight wInter
Table S.13 : Loss-related hyperparameter sweep on the NAVSIM navtest split. Default settings are marked with ∗ . All three sit in a smooth basin.
Machine Intelligence, Interaction, and Imagination (Mi3) Laboratory, University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA. · Laboratory for Intelligent & Safe Automobiles (LISA), University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.