Autonomous Driving Planning

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Overview

Autonomous driving planning turns sensor and map information, navigation goals, and predictions about other road users into decisions and vehicle trajectories. Approaches range from search and model predictive control (MPC), reachability and barrier methods, and game-theoretic planning to imitation learning, reinforcement learning, diffusion planners, and vision-language-action or world-action models. Systems increasingly combine prediction with planning to handle interactions, uncertainty, occlusion, and rare hazards, and are evaluated on benchmarks such as nuPlan, nuScenes, NAVSIM, Bench2Drive, and Waymo. A central challenge is that good open-loop trajectory scores do not guarantee safe, efficient closed-loop driving, while stronger safety checks and richer models must still meet real-time constraints and generalize to unfamiliar scenarios.

Latest papers

CardsList

385 papers50 papers in the last four weeks, up 35% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. SafeDrive: Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning for End-to-End Driving in a Sparse World

    Feb 21, 2026Jungho Kim, Jiyong Oh, Seunghoon Yu +3Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

  2. Interacting safely with cyclists using Hamilton-Jacobi reachability and reinforcement learning

    Feb 20, 2026Aarati Andrea Noronha, Jean OhAutonomous Driving PlanningSafe RL

  3. Hybrid System Planning using a Mixed-Integer ADMM Heuristic and Hybrid Zonotopes

    Feb 19, 2026Joshua A. Robbins, Andrew F. Thompson, Jonah J. Glunt +1Motion PlanningAlternating Direction Method of Multipliers

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 USA

  4. Dodging the Moose: Experimental Insights in Real-Life Automated Collision Avoidance

    Feb 19, 2026Leila Gharavi, Simone Baldi, Yuki Hosomi +4Collision AvoidanceAutonomous Driving Planning

    Delft Center for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. · School of Mathematics, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. · Department of Advanced Energy, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Chiba 277-8561, Japan.

  5. The Impact of Class Uncertainty Propagation in Perception-Based Motion Planning

    Feb 17, 2026Jibran Iqbal Shah, Andrei Ivanovic, Kelly Zhu +4Autonomous Driving PlanningMotion Planning

    Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. · Toyota Research Institute.

  6. Multimodal Belief-Space Covariance Steering with Active Probing and Influence for Interactive Driving

    Feb 16, 2026Devodita Chakravarty, John Dolan, Yiwei LyuRisk-Sensitive PlanningAutonomous Driving Planning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India · Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

  7. HERMES: A Holistic End-to-End Risk-Aware Multimodal Embodied System with Vision-Language Models for Long-Tail Autonomous Driving

    Feb 1, 2026Weizhe Tang, Junwei You, Jiaxi Liu +7Long-Tail Autonomous DrivingVLMs for Autonomous Driving

    Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53711 USA

  8. Drive-JEPA: Video JEPA Meets Multimodal Trajectory Distillation for End-to-End Driving

    Jan 29, 2026Linhan Wang, Zichong Yang, Chen Bai +6End-to-End Autonomous DrivingNavSim

    Virginia Tech · Purdue University · XPENG Motors +1

  9. UniDrive-WM: Unified Understanding, Planning and Generation World Model for Autonomous Driving

    Jan 7, 2026Zhexiao Xiong, Xin Ye, Burhan Yaman +5Vision-Language ModelsWorld Model Learning

    Bosch Research North America · Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI) · Arizona State University +2

  10. AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Jan 5, 2026Yanhao Wu, Haoyang Zhang, Fei He +6Collision AvoidanceEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

    School of Software Engineering, XJTU · Horizon Robotics · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

  11. SpaceDrive: Infusing Spatial Awareness into VLM-based Autonomous Driving

    Dec 11, 2025Peizheng Li, Zhenghao Zhang, David Holtz +6Vision-Language ModelsVLMs for Autonomous Driving

    Mercedes-Benz AG · TU Munich · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology +4

  12. Closing the Navigation Compliance Gap in End-to-end Autonomous Driving

    Dec 11, 2025Hanfeng Wu, Marlon Steiner, Michael Schmidt +2Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Karlsruhe, Germany · BMW Group Munich, Germany

  13. Driving is a Game: Combining Planning and Prediction with Bayesian Iterative Best Response

    Dec 3, 2025Aron Distelzweig, Yiwei Wang, Faris Janjoš +5Autonomous Driving PlanningMulti-Agent Planning

    University of Freiburg, Germany · Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany · Technical University of Munich, Germany +2

  14. GraphPilot: Grounded Scene Graph Conditioning for Language-Based Autonomous Driving

    Nov 14, 2025Fabian Schmidt, Markus Enzweiler, Abhinav ValadaVision-Language ModelsVLMs for Autonomous Driving

    Esslingen University of Applied Sciences · University of Freiburg

  15. HENet++: Hybrid Encoding and Multi-task Learning for 3D Perception and End-to-end Autonomous Driving

    Nov 10, 2025Zhongyu Xia, Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang +1Autonomous Driving PerceptionEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China. · University of California, Merced, USA.

  16. Zero-Human Demonstration End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Trajectory Scorer

    Oct 28, 2025Zhenxin Li, Nadine Chang, Wenhao Yao +9Long-Tail Autonomous DrivingReinforcement Learning

    Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University · *Work done during an internship at NVIDIA. · NVIDIA +3

  17. More Than Meets the Eye? Uncovering the Reasoning-Planning Disconnect in Training Vision-Language Driving Models

    Oct 6, 2025Xurui Song, Shuo Huai, JingJing Jiang +2VLMs for Autonomous DrivingReasoning for VLA Models

    S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  18. Drive As You Like: Multi-Head Diffusion with Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Driving

    Aug 23, 2025Ding Fan, Xuewen Luo, Hwa Hui Tew +3Autonomous Driving PlanningAutonomous Driving

    Monash University, Malaysia · University of Utah, USA · Monash University, Australia

  19. OEL-AD: An Online Evolutive Learning Framework for Cross-Region Adaptive Autonomous Driving

    Aug 15, 2025Jiayue Jin, Lang Qian, Jingyu Zhang +2Autonomous DrivingAdaptive Learning

    College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  20. CogAD: Cognitive-Hierarchy Guided End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    May 27, 2025Zhennan Wang, Jianing Teng, Canqun Xiang +4End-to-End Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Perception

    HAOMO.AI Technology Co., Ltd

  21. Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: A Review

    May 21, 2025Katharina Winter, Abhishek Vivekanandan, Rupert Polley +17Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    Munich University of Applied Sciences, Intelligent Vehicles Lab (IVL), 80335 Munich, Germany · FZI Research Center for Information Technology, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany · Continental Automotive Technologies GmbH, Guericke Str.7, 60488 Frankfurt a. M., Germany +6

  22. A Survey of Reinforcement Learning-Based Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving: Lessons Learned from a Driving Task Perspective

    Mar 31, 2025Zhuoren Li, Guizhe Jin, Ran Yu +8Autonomous Driving PlanningRL for Autonomous Driving

    College of Automotive and Energy Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

  23. Does Knowledge About Perceptual Uncertainty Help an Agent in Automated Driving?

    Feb 17, 2025Natalie Grabowsky, Annika Mütze, Joshua Wendland +2Autonomous Driving PlanningRL for Autonomous Driving

    Institute of Mathematics Technical University of Berlin Berlin, Germany · Department of Mathematics University of Wuppertal Wuppertal, Germany · Faculty of Computer Science Ruhr University Bochum Bochum, Germany

  24. Occlusion-Aware Contingency Safety-Critical Planning for Autonomous Driving

    Feb 10, 2025Lei Zheng, Rui Yang, Minzhe Zheng +3Safe Motion PlanningMotion Planning

    Robotics and Autonomous Systems Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511453, China · School of Engineering, Great Bay University, Dongguan 523000, China · Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China

  25. Fading Expert Guidance: Bridging Model-Based and Learning-Based Control for Abortable Autonomous Overtaking

    Aug 18, 2023Jinxiong Lu, Gokhan Alcan, Ville KyrkiAutonomous Driving PlanningRL for Autonomous Driving

    Intelligent Robotics Group, Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Aalto University, 02150 Espoo, Finland