cs.ROAug 20, 2026

Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms

Authors: Yanchen Guan, Xingcheng Liu, Bin Rao, Chengyue Wang, Guofa Li, Yunjian Li, Lishengsa Yue, Zhiyong Cui, 

Organizations: State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, University of Macau, Macau SAR, 999078, China · College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, 999077, China · School of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, No. 4800 Cao’an Road, Shanghai, 201804, China · 

Abstract

End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from camera-to-control regression toward planning-oriented systems that use structured representations, trajectory-level outputs, and increasingly realistic evaluation protocols. This survey reviews this transition across behavior cloning, conditional imitation learning, privileged distillation, BEV and vectorized planning, unified perception-prediction-planning architectures, world-model-based planners, and vision-language-action systems. We argue that the key distinction in modern end-to-end driving is not whether intermediate representations are used, but whether they are learned, supervised, and evaluated to support safe, feasible, and route-compliant planning. To organize the literature, we synthesize existing methods along four axes: input representation, planning output, supervision signal, and evaluation protocol. We further examine the benchmark shift from open-loop trajectory matching to closed-loop simulation, non-reactive real-log evaluation, long-tail testing, and human-preference-aware metrics. Our analysis highlights that architectural progress is difficult to interpret without benchmark-consistent evaluation, and that displacement-based open-loop metrics alone provide limited evidence for safe and human-aligned driving. We conclude with open challenges in uncertainty-aware planning, learner-expert mismatch, runtime safety assurance, language-action grounding, world-model validation, and reproducible benchmarking.

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