End-to-End Autonomous Driving

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19 papers in the last four weeks, up 90% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

LWDrive: Layer-Wise World-Model-Guided Vision-Language Model Planning for Autonomous Driving

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide powerful semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) planning. However, trajectories directly generated by VLMs often encode only coarse driving intentions and remain insufficient for geometrically accurate, future-aware, and multi-view-grounded planning. To address these limitations, we develop the Layer-Wise World-Model-Guided Driving framework (LWDrive). LWDrive is a VLM planning framework that refines coarse trajectories through layer-wise world-model guidance. Instead of treating the VLM output as the final trajectory, LWDrive uses it as an intent-aware coarse plan, expands a diverse candidate space around it, and progressively refines the candidates through a Foresight Cascade Planner (FCP). Specifically, we introduce future-frame generation supervision to encourage the VLM to learn forward-looking scene representations, thereby injecting planning-relevant predictive dynamics into its internal hidden states. Built upon these world-model-supervised representations, FCP exploits VLM features across multiple layers and integrates historical temporal states, Action-Query representations, and current-frame multi-view Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features to refine candidate trajectories in a coarse-to-fine manner. This design enables progressive correction of spatial positions and motion trends while grounding trajectory refinement with multi-view scene cues and preserving the high-level driving intention produced by the large model. Finally, a score head evaluates the refined candidates and selects the best trajectory as the final planning output. Experiments show that LWDrive achieves a score of 92.0 on the NAVSIM benchmark and 89.6 on NAVSIM-v2. Code and models will be made publicly available.

Chen Yang, Yuhao Wei, Ze Xu +6

Chongqing University

VLMs for Autonomous Driving End-to-End Autonomous Driving World Model-Based Planning Model-Based Planning World Models for Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 27, 2026cs.CL

EVLA: An Electro-Aware Multimodal Assistant for Physically-Grounded Driving Reasoning and Control

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) for driving assistants typically treat vehicle dynamics as a black box, resulting in decisions that lack awareness of the vehicle's real-time electro-mechanical state. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Electro-Visual-Language Assistant (EVLA) -- a novel framework that combines multi-modal scene understanding with real-time perception of the electrified powertrain state (e.g., motor torque, battery SOC). Our approach features two key innovations: first, a Unified Co-State Encoder (UCSE) that fuses visual, textual, and vehicle-state inputs into a shared latent representation, augmented with an Energy-Efficiency Field to model spatial energy costs; and second, an Electro-aware Structured Reasoning Chain (ESRC), which replaces external chain-of-thought prompting with an internal, deterministic reasoning process grounded in physical constraints and optimization objectives. Trained end-to-end with a physics-guided joint loss, EVLA learns to generate context-aware and energy-optimal driving decisions. Extensive evaluations on a driving QA benchmark demonstrate that EVLA substantially outperforms strong fine-tuned VLM baselines, improving the final score by +0.0871 and accuracy by +5.6%. Ablation studies validate the necessity of each component, and efficiency analyses show that EVLA achieves 36% faster inference than multi-stage pipelines. This work underscores that integrating vehicle-state awareness and structured physical reasoning is crucial for developing next-generation, physically-grounded driving assistants.

Yuxin Liu, Zihan Chen, Haoyu Wang +3

College of Computer Science and Technology Zhejiang University Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

VLMs for Autonomous Driving End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving VLM Reasoning Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jun 27, 2026cs.CV

X-Mind: Efficient Visual Chain-of-Thought via Predictive World Model for End-to-End Driving

Predicting future states is essential for autonomous agents, yet current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models fundamentally lack this capability, relying instead on reactive perception-action mapping. While integrating Predictive World Models (PWMs) addresses this gap, existing approaches either incur prohibitive cascaded latency or act as shallow terminal tasks that fail to deeply embed forward-looking reasoning. To endow VLA models with this reasoning capability, we propose X-Mind. Rather than treating PWMs as an external auxiliary module, this framework internalizes them as the Visual Chain-of-Thought (Visual CoT). By enforcing a world rollout prior to action, the model is constrained to imagine future evolution first, yielding a driving policy that is robustly grounded in environmental dynamics and aware of the future consequences its actions will unfold. The challenge here is efficiency, and we tackle it on two fronts. First, we introduce a compact representation of visual thinking: an abstract sketch that fuses a Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) layout with abstract driving priors (e.g., navigation intents and traffic rules). Rather than rolling out dense future frames, the model reasons over this sketch as a mental canvas; aided by a Deep Compression Autoencoder (DC-AE), a 12-frame future rollout is reduced to merely 96 tokens, alleviating the long-context computational bottleneck. Second, to accelerate generation further, we propose a recurrent block diffusion scheme that unrolls the denoising steps across the layers of the large drive model, folding iterative refinement into the backbone's one forward pass. Trained and validated on large-scale real-world data, X-Mind achieves competitive end-to-end driving performance, which makes it a highly practical, low-latency solution that successfully deploys large-scale cognitive reasoning directly onto resource-constrained vehicle platforms.

Bohao Zhao, Chengrui Wei, Guangfeng Jiang +17

PWM Team, XPeng Inc.

World Model Learning End-to-End Autonomous Driving Efficient VLM Inference Vision-Language-Action Models World Models for Autonomous Driving Visual CoT

Jun 24, 2026cs.CV

UniTeD: Unified Temporal Diffusion for Joint Perception and Planning in Autonomous Driving

Diffusion models have shown strong potential for multi-modal planning in end-to-end autonomous driving. However, most existing methods confine diffusion to the planning module, conditioning on fixed outputs from separate discriminative perception networks. This decoupled design propagates perception errors to the planner, increasing optimization difficulty and reducing robustness. To overcome these limitations, we propose UniTeD, a Unified Temporal Diffusion framework that jointly models perception and planning through iterative denoising in a shared generative space. By enabling bidirectional information exchange, the framework facilitates mutual refinement between tasks and improves robustness via noise-conditioned multi-task training. We further extend this unified diffusion paradigm to a streaming setting by incorporating temporal context. A Temporal Transition Module (TTM) is introduced to resolve the noise-level mismatch between historical and current frames. In addition, we propose an Anchor Refresh Strategy (ARS) to alleviate the training-inference distribution shift commonly observed in sparse diffusion-based end-to-end driving frameworks. Without bells and whistles, UniTeD achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, surpassing both recent discriminative end-to-end methods and diffusion-based planning approaches.

Bo Zhao, Xinting Zhao, Naifan Li +2

Nullmax · Westlake University

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Diffusion-Based Planning Autonomous Driving Perception Diffusion Models

Jun 23, 2026cs.CV

DriveStack-VLA: Render-Teacher Alignment for BEV-Based DeepStack Vision-Language-Action Model

Vision-Language-Action driving models convert a pretrained Vision-Language Model into a driving policy, allowing them to use world knowledge and follow language guidances. However, existing VLA driving models still lack driving-oriented spatial intelligence: their policies are mainly grounded on perspective image tokens and language priors, while precise motion planning requires metric geometry, top-down scene structure, and attention to safety-critical perceptual cues. This limitation makes current models vulnerable to weak visual geometry modeling and perceptual coverage in expert demonstrations. In this paper, we present DriveStack-VLA, a framework built upon a large VLM backbone. To strengthen the spatial grounding of VLA driving, we develop dual visual modeling components. We inject a Bird-Eye-View representation into the Large Language Model decoder through a DeepStack-style connection, and propose Render-Teacher Alignment to align the perceptual focus of real images with that of rasterized images. Furthermore, to bridge the gap in multimodal trajectory selection, we introduce a head-based self-critique module that ranks sampled trajectories and conditionally refines the best one. DriveStack-VLA achieves 91.6 PDMS on NAVSIMv1, 91.0 EPDMS on NAVSIMv2 (with the human penalty filter enabled), and a driving score of 79.49 with a success rate of 56.36% on the closed-loop Bench2Drive. More visualizations are available on our project page: https://anonymous.4open.science/w/drivestack-vla/.

Jingke Wang, Zhenru Zhao, Shuangming Lei +8

Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. · The 2012 Labs, Huawei.

VLMs for Autonomous Driving End-to-End Autonomous Driving Vision-Language-Action Models Autonomous Driving Simulation

Jun 22, 2026cs.CV

Intend, Reflect, Refine: An Adaptive Multimodal Reflection Framework for Autonomous Driving

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving by incorporating reasoning for better interpretability and planning quality. However, most existing approaches directly generate the final trajectory without explicitly examining its future consequences, which limits their reliability in complex and dynamic environments. To address this limitation, we propose IRR-Drive (Intend, Reflect, Refine), an adaptive multimodal reflection framework for autonomous driving. Specifically, to tightly couple high-level reasoning with physical constraints, IRR-Drive first generates a preliminary textual intention and anticipates potential interactions by predicting future semantic bird's-eye view (BEV) representations. This dual-modality (Text + BEV) reflection space explicitly models anticipated scene evolution, enabling the model to rigorously self-correct and refine its initial intent before generating the final trajectory. Furthermore, to balance planning performance and computational efficiency, we construct reflection-oriented training data and design an adaptive reflection reward, enabling the model to adaptively select its reasoning mode according to scene complexity. Instead of using reasoning primarily as an auxiliary interpretation, IRR-Drive directly integrates an adaptive reflection mechanism into the planning framework, enabling grounded, decision-aware trajectory correction that is driven by scene complexity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM benchmark in both PDMS and EPDMS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal reflection framework and validate the efficacy of the proposed adaptive reflection strategy.

Zisheng Chen, Yuping Qiu, Jianhua Han +6

Sun Yat-sen University · HKUST(GZ) · Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd.

VLMs for Autonomous Driving End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Preserving Policy Compatibility Under Perception Updates in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving systems tightly couple perception and decision-making through latent representations. Consequently, updates to perception models can alter these representations and degrade the performance of downstream policies that remain fixed. Existing solutions typically rely on policy retraining or architectural decoupling, both of which incur substantial computation and validation costs. In this paper, we formulate the model stitching problem for end-to-end autonomous driving and test the hypothesis that policy compatibility can be preserved through lightweight latent-space alignment. We study low-complexity model stitching methods, including linear and convolutional stitchers, for restoring compatibility between updated perception modules and frozen downstream policy modules. Experiments demonstrate that stitching effectively preserves downstream driving behavior under diverse perception updates, including changes in random initialization, sensor configuration, and training domain. In the most challenging cross-domain setting from nuScenes to CARLA, convolutional stitching retains over 91% of the no-shift driving score while reducing adaptation time from \SI{22.18}{h} to \SI{0.91}{h}. These results suggest that model stitching provides an effective and computationally efficient alternative to retraining or fine-tuning for maintaining end-to-end autonomous driving systems. The model will be open-sourced upon paper acceptance at https://github.com/SCP-CN-001/model-stitching to support further research and development in autonomous driving.

Yueyuan Li, Yifei Xiao, Mingyang Jiang +3

School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China, Shanghai, 200240, CN · School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, CN · Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, CN

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Perception

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

OmniV2X: A Generative Foundation Planner for Efficient End-to-End Cooperative Driving

We present OmniV2X, a generative foundation model for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) cooperative driving. The model directly interprets independent context sequences comprising multi-modal and multi-agent observations. The new design mitigates the computational cost of dense 3D perception, the vulnerability to data scarcity in cooperative scenarios, and the poor compliance with standardized messaging in existing methods that fuse multi-modal inputs into a shared representation. For training, we present an end-to-end supervised pipeline using a downstream trajectory generation loss, in which a high-capacity generative sequence planner implicitly learns to steer the model and leverage multi-modal inputs via cross-attention injection. As a foundation model, we demonstrate that OmniV2X pre-trained on large-scale single-agent planning datasets can efficiently adapt to cooperative environments by integrating the conditioning context with lightweight, standard-compliant V2X tokens. Evaluated on the DAIR-V2X-Seq dataset, OmniV2X outperforms existing end-to-end cooperative driving baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance with less than 10% of the fine-tune V2X dataset and less than 1% of the communication bandwidth. We conduct comprehensive evaluations to demonstrate its computational efficiency and robustness under real-world constraints.

Juntong Peng, Juanwu Lu, Yupeng Zhou +3

College of Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

End-to-End Autonomous Driving LLM Planning Autonomous Driving V2X Communication Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

Mind the Privileged-to-Camera Gap: Actor-Centric Sidecar Supervision for Camera-First Open-Loop Waypoint Prediction

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

\pm

0.02 m final displacement error (FDE), and the matched no-teacher non-sidecar RGB control obtains 1.716

\pm

0.02 m. Road-user sidecar supervision (RU-sidecar) reduces FDE to 1.223

\pm

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

\pm

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.

Feeza Khan Khanzada, Jaerock Kwon

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan-Dearborn, 4901 Evergreen Rd, Dearborn, MI 48128, United States

Representation Learning End-to-End Autonomous Driving Learning Using Privileged Information

Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

Lagrange: An Open-Vocabulary, Energy-Based Sparse Framework for Generalized End-to-End Driving

Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories. Existing paradigms face a distinct dichotomy between representational efficiency and generalization capacity. Dense models (e.g., occupancy networks), while geometrically robust, incur critical computational bottlenecks and struggle with high-level semantic reasoning. Conversely, sparse, query-based planners are efficient but reliant on closed-set definitions, rendering them vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) events. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer open-vocabulary reasoning, their autoregressive, discrete token generation fundamentally conflicts with the continuous, high-frequency control requirements of vehicle dynamics. To address this, we propose Lagrange, an open-vocabulary, computationally sparse driving framework based on Masked Latent Fields (MLF). Rather than relying on dense volumetric reconstructions or closed-set query mechanisms, Lagrange exploits Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to encode class-agnostic object proposals into continuous semantic visual tokens. We introduce an intent-driven masked cross-attention module that temporally filters irrelevant entities, decoding the attended tokens into an implicit continuous energy field defined over spatial coordinates. By framing decision-making as a Lagrangian action minimization problem spanning this energy field, we enforce strict compliance with vehicle kinematics while executing collision avoidance. Extensive offline evaluations on both standard (nuScenes) and long-tail (CODA) benchmarks demonstrate that Lagrange establishes a promising framework for robust, interpretable, and kinematically feasible open-world autonomy.

Shihao Ji, HongXi Li, Zihui Song +1

VLMs for Autonomous Driving End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

Luke Rowe, Roger Girgis, Rodrigue de Schaetzen +6

Mila · Université de Montréal · Polytechnique Montréal +4

Self-Play RL End-to-End Autonomous Driving Dataset Aggregation Autonomous Driving Simulation

Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

TerraTransfer: Learning End-to-End Driving Policies Without Expert Demonstrations

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and real-world deployments. Its standard training recipe, however, is expensive across all stages: collecting and labeling millions of driving frames is costly, and closed-loop RL on images is bottlenecked by the per-step cost of photorealistic rendering plus a forward pass through a large vision backbone. Self-play in vectorized simulators changes the economics: millions of rollout steps per second, and a state distribution naturally rich in collisions, near-misses, and recoveries that no driving log contains. Our approach exploits this asymmetry by decoupling learning to drive from learning to see. We pretrain a single policy by self-play, then align its latent space with a pretrained vision backbone, through the action KL divergence and a batch-relational low-rank structural loss. The action target comes from the self-play policy, so alignment never supervises against a logged trajectory: a paired dataset of (image, scene-state) frames suffices, with no need for the curated expert demonstrations that imitation pretraining is built on. On photorealistic 3D Gaussian splatting closed-loop scenarios, the resulting end-to-end policy matches or exceeds prior end-to-end methods.

Zikang Xiong, Weixin Li, Zhouchonghao Wu +6

1Applied Intuition · 2UCLA · 3UC Berkeley

End-to-End Autonomous Driving RL for Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Simulation

Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

GraphBEV++: Multi-Modal Feature Alignment for Autonomous Driving

Feature misalignment in BEV perception is a critical yet often overlooked challenge in autonomous driving, especially under calibration uncertainties between LiDAR and camera sensors. To address this issue, we propose a robust multi-modal fusion framework, GraphBEV++, which systematically mitigates projection-induced misalignment. The framework consists of two key modules: LocalAlign-v2 and GlobalAlign-v2. LocalAlign-v2 introduces neighborhood-aware depth features via graph matching to correct local misalignment. It supports both LSS-based and query-based BEV representations, making it compatible with BEVFusion and BEVFormer architectures for consistent cross-paradigm alignment. GlobalAlign-v2 encompasses two variants: Deformable and Diffusion. The Deformable variant addresses global misalignment in LSS-based multi-modal BEV by explicitly learning cross-modal feature offsets. In contrast, the Diffusion variant targets implicit misalignment in query-based BEV by injecting noise to simulate misalignment and employing a denoising process to recover aligned features. Experimental results show that GraphBEV++ achieves state-of-the-art performance under misalignment noise on nuScenes and Waymo subset, improves long-range detection on Argoverse2, and generalizes effectively to the 3D occupancy prediction task, consistently improving occupancy estimation accuracy and robustness under both clean and noisy settings. Furthermore, GraphBEV++ effectively alleviates misalignment issues in end-to-end autonomous driving. Compared with five baselines (UniAD, VAD, FusionAD, MomAD, and WoTE), it demonstrates superior performance in both open-loop (nuScenes) and closed-loop (Bench2Drive and NAVSIM) evaluations across perception, prediction, and planning tasks.

Ziying Song, Caiyan Jia, Lin Liu +3

Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University · School of Artificial Intelligence (School of Software), Yanshan University · University of Macau +2

Diffusion Model Alignment End-to-End Autonomous Driving Cross-Modal Alignment Camera-LiDAR Fusion Autonomous Driving Perception

Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

Ziying Song, Caiyan Jia, Lin Liu +8

Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

World Model Learning End-to-End Autonomous Driving Long-Horizon Planning Safe Motion Planning Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 12, 2026cs.RO

CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

Zikun Guo

School of Intelligent Driving, Xinwei Institute of Artificial Intelligence · Geely Central Research Institute

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Planning Causal Interpretability Shortcut Learning

Jun 12, 2026cs.RO

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Hauteng Wu, Xu Li, Dong Kong +4

School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China · College of Transportation, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China +1

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Parking Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 12, 2026cs.CV

RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly modeling visual perception, language reasoning, explainability and action prediction. However, their large vision-language backbones and reasoning modules introduce substantial inference latency and thereby prevent their deployment in the unforgiving reality of the road networks. We propose RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled VLA model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo model into a compact student through multi-level supervised distillation. RT-VLA preserves language-based reasoning and supports post-hoc explanation through offline language analysis of safety-critical driving moments without adding latency to real-time control. Compared to the SimLingo teacher, RT-VLA maintains competitive closed-loop driving and language reasoning performance while reducing inference time by 44.8X in vision-only mode and 7.9X in vision+language mode. These results suggest that supervised distillation is a practical approach for building real-time, explainable VLA-style autonomous driving models.

Xiangyu Huang, Zhenlin Hua, Han Zhou +2

Carnegie Mellon University

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Efficient VLM Inference VLM Distillation Efficient VLA Model Inference VLM Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Models+1

Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can describe scenes and reason about them in language, yet still struggle to ground their actions in the dense 3D world around them. Existing approaches either inject features from a frozen 3D foundation model without an objective that ensures the policy uses them, or constrain geometry with sparse box and map losses that provide no dense spatial signal. We introduce VLGA, the first vision-language-action model supervised to reconstruct the dense 3D world it drives through. VLGA introduces geometry as a fourth modality alongside vision, language, and action through a dedicated expert supervised by a per-pixel pointmap regression loss against LiDAR. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets for open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, respectively, show the superiority of VLGA over counterpart VLA methods. In particular, on open-loop nuScenes, VLGA sets a new state of the art among VLA methods without ego status, with the lowest L2 (0.50,m average) and 3-second collision rate (0.18%). On closed-loop Bench2Drive, VLGA attains the state-of-the-art driving score of 79.08, +0.71 over the strongest prior VLA, at comparable efficiency and comfort.

Jin Yao, Dhruva Dixith Kurra, Tom Lampo +3

Uber AV Labs · University of Virginia

VLMs for Autonomous Driving End-to-End Autonomous Driving Vision-Language-Action Models

Jun 9, 2026cs.RO

An Exposure-Time-Aligned Primary-Path Architecture for Autonomous-Driving ECUs

While end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving has become the dominant research direction, production vehicles continue to rely on modular multi-NN pipelines for a non-trivial transitional period. The subject of this paper is the design of an architecture that, during this phase, supports a modular pipeline and an E2E path side by side and embeds a path for staged migration. Transplanted to a production SoC, egalitarian late fusion is compute-inefficient and offers no natural unit for staged E2E substitution. As an alternative, we propose three design principles: (i) Primary-Path, which selects a primary perception-to-planner chain and prioritizes its enclosure within a single SoC over the non-critical paths, (ii) Exposure-Time-Aligned, which propagates the primary sensor's exposure time

τ_{\mathrm{exp}}

as a tag along the chain and event-drives the fusion node on matched

τ_{\mathrm{exp}}

rather than a fixed cycle, and (iii) Co-Path Coexistence, which, building on (i) and (ii), lets an E2E output path co-run with the modular pipeline within the same

τ_{\mathrm{exp}}

cycle. On a Dual-SoC production AD-ECU, the implementation achieves a camera-shutter to planner-output latency of 296 ms on average within a 350 ms design budget, with the modular pipeline and the E2E path coexisting within the shared

τ_{\mathrm{exp}}

cycle.

Toru Saito, Yuki Hagura, Tatsuya Konishi +2

Sony Honda Mobility Inc. · Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving

Jun 5, 2026cs.RO

Planning-aligned Token Compression for Long-Context Autonomous Driving

Monolithic vision-action models represent an emerging paradigm in autonomous driving. However, this architecture produces token sequences that quickly exceed real-time computational budgets when encoding extended temporal context for complex interactions. While approaches like linear transformers and external memory try to make the context lightweight, token compression is most compatible with the architecture as it requires no backbone modifications. Yet existing compression adopts rule-based heuristics like temporal decay, decoupled from planning, risking loss of decision-critical information. We propose COMPACT-VA, a planning-aligned working memory framework built on conditional VQ-VAE, compressing extended context into bounded representations. Compression is conditioned on both historical trajectory and a learned planning intent that the posterior encoder distills from future trajectories during training, while the prior encoder learns to predict it from compressed observations. The compressed memory, concatenated with the predicted latent, feeds the policy for end-to-end optimization, planning with retained decision-critical information. We evaluate on high-signal dynamic scenarios where historical context is most critical for behavior correctness (e.g., stop, yield, or proceed), and accordingly design behavioral metrics. Under comparable token budgets, we achieve

>

6% improvement (68.3%) on success rates with consistent gains across metrics. Ablations validate planning-aligned coupling effectiveness. Closed-loop evaluation confirms that COMPACT-VA maintained general driving performance with 3.3* speedup and 2.7* memory reduction over uncompressed processing.

Zhixuan Liang, Yuxiao Chen, Yurong You +12

NVIDIA Research · School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder Multimodal Token Compression Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 5, 2026cs.RO

Test-Time Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end planners for autonomous driving typically generate a set of candidate trajectories, score each one, and return the highest-scoring candidate. However, the scorer is applied only after the proposals are generated and cannot influence the set of trajectories: a weak set of candidates limits planning performance regardless of the scorer's quality. We instead treat the scorer as a learned trajectory-level reward function and search for trajectories that maximize it. Our method, TOAD, runs the Cross-Entropy Method at test time, warm-started from the planner's proposals. It requires no retraining and is plug-and-play for existing planners. Across six base planners, TOAD improves results on NAVSIM-v1 (94.7 PDMS), NAVSIM-v2 (56.3 EPDMS), and the closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark. The code will be made publicly available via the project page: https://valeoai.github.io/TOAD/.

Yihong Xu, Eloi Zablocki, Yuan Yin +4

valeo.ai, Paris, France · Sorbonne Universit´e, CNRS, ISIR, F-75005 Paris, France

Trajectory Optimization Trajectory Generation Inference-Time Optimization End-to-End Autonomous Driving Test-Time Optimization Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

Vault: One-Step Latent Generation with Positive-Anchored Rewards for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving must balance multimodal maneuver generation against real-time inference constraints. Diffusion planners capture diverse behaviors, but their iterative denoising incurs considerable inference cost in safety-critical deployment, while one-step alternatives still imitate only the single expert demonstration, so neither family certifies both the diversity and the quality of its outputs. To address this, we propose Vault, a framework that couples one-step latent generation with sample-based reinforcement learning guidance. Built on a V-JEPA 2.1 visual representation pretrained on the full NAVSIM training imagery, Vault generates trajectory candidates in a single forward pass by drifting in a VAE latent space. During training, a reward-gated positive pool collects the maximum-scoring trajectories that the model itself discovers under the official evaluator and anchors the drift targets to these certified samples. This closes a reinforcement-learning loop purely through sample-based target construction, without policy gradients, learned reward models, or extra interaction: the generator imitates the frontier of its own certified successes, so quality and multimodality improve together under a single fixed sampling configuration. A learned scorer that predicts the official score and its sub-metrics then selects the executed trajectory, and all training-only modules are discarded at inference. On the NAVSIM benchmarks, Vault achieves state-of-the-art performance at real-time inference cost, reaching 94.6 PDMS on v1 and 91.2 EPDMS on v2.

Yining Xing, Zehong Ke, Zhiyuan Liu +1

End-to-End Autonomous Driving One-Step Generative Modeling RL for Generative Models Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

Discrete-WAM: Unified Discrete Vision-Action Token Editing for World-Policy Learning

Autonomous driving requires reasoning about how ego actions shape future world evolution, rather than merely mapping observations to actions. However, most end-to-end methods rely on direct state-to-action imitation, while existing world models often remain weakly aligned with downstream policy generation. We introduce Discrete-WAM, a unified discrete vision-action world-policy framework that represents visual observations, future states, high-level decisions, and ego actions within a shared token space. Built on this discrete alignment, Discrete-WAM jointly trains world modeling, world-policy modeling, and policy modeling through multi-task and multi-stage pretraining, allowing action-conditioned future prediction to directly support policy generation. For downstream planning, Discrete-WAM further decomposes policy generation into hierarchical decision prediction and parallel action-token editing, where the decision token provides a high-level planning skeleton and confidence-based scheduling refines dense future actions efficiently. Experiments on large-scale autonomous-driving benchmarks show that Discrete-WAM achieves strong planning performance while supporting controllable future generation, counterfactual evaluation, surprise-based world-model analysis, and efficient parallel policy decoding. These results suggest that discrete representation alignment, unified world-policy training, and hierarchical token editing provide a promising design paradigm for physical AI.

Ziyang Yao, Haochen Liu, Yuncheng Jiang +10

Xiaomi EV

Hierarchical Planning World Model Learning End-to-End Autonomous Driving World Models World Model-Based Planning Action-Conditioned World Models+2

Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

D $^3$ -MoE:Dual Disentangled Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts for Style-Controllable End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Traditional end-to-end autonomous driving frameworks frequently suffer from the "style-averaging" dilemma when trained on high-variance human demonstrations, yielding homogenized, style-uncontrollable, and even kinematically unsafe policies. To overcome this limitation, we present D

^3

-MoE (Dual Disentangled Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts), which disentangles trajectory modeling along two complementary axes. On the behavioral axis, generation is decoupled from selection: a style-conditioned diffusion process synthesizes multi-style candidate trajectories in parallel within a single scene, allowing a downstream module to select the optimal trajectory based on user preference or an evaluation score. On the physical axis, decoupled longitudinal and lateral routers activate their respective experts during inference time, trained without manual labels using self-supervised targets from orthogonal ground-truth kinematics. These activated experts, architected as Diffusion Transformers (DiT) and equipped with style-conditioned AdaLN and asymmetric lateral-fusion cross-attention, independently predict their corresponding physical state before being reassembled into a unified, kinematically coherent trajectory. Extensive evaluations on the challenging NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that D

^3

-MoE achieves state-of-the-art planning performance, reaching 88.2 PDMS and 84.3 EPDMS by default. Moreover, our Best-of-Three ensemble strategy effectively broadens the multi-modal solution space, raising performance to 91.3 PDMS and 87.5 EPDMS. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses jointly confirm the framework's advantages in planning quality and style controllability.

Renju Feng, Rukang Wang, Ning Xi +4

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Diffusion-Based Planning Mixture of Experts Autonomous Driving Planning

Jun 2, 2026cs.CV

StandardE2E: A Unified Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Datasets

Autonomous driving has shifted from modular perception-prediction-planning stacks toward end-to-end (E2E) models that map sensor inputs directly to vehicle control, often regularized by auxiliary tasks such as 3D detection, motion forecasting, and HD-map perception. Progress is driven by a fast-growing ecosystem of sensor-rich driving datasets, yet each ships its own file formats, APIs, coordinate conventions, and modality coverage, leaving cross-dataset experimentation and even basic per-dataset preprocessing to be re-implemented per project. We present StandardE2E, a framework that provides a single unified interface over E2E driving datasets. StandardE2E (i) standardizes per-dataset preprocessing under one shared data schema; (ii) combines multiple datasets in a single PyTorch DataLoader for cross-dataset pretraining, auxiliary-task supervision, and scenario-level filtering; and (iii) reduces adding a new dataset to a single per-dataset mapping from raw frames to the canonical schema, leaving the entire downstream pipeline unchanged. The framework supports six datasets out of the box: Waymo End-to-End, Waymo Perception, Argoverse 2 Sensor, Argoverse 2 LiDAR, NAVSIM (OpenScene-v1.1), and WayveScenes101, and is released as the open-source standard-e2e Python package, available at https://github.com/stepankonev/StandardE2E.

Stepan Konev

Autonomous Driving Datasets End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving

Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

The Road Ahead in Autonomous Driving: The KITScenes Multimodal Dataset

Existing autonomous driving datasets have enabled major progress, but fall short in sensor fidelity, map completeness, or geographic diversity. We present KITScenes Multimodal, a European dataset built around high-fidelity sensors and maps. Our fully synchronized sensor suite combines high-resolution global-shutter cameras, long-range lidar beyond 400m, 4D imaging radar, and redundant GNSS/INS localization. Our HD maps are, to our knowledge, the most complete of any sensor dataset, validated through autonomous driving trials on open-source software. For the first time in a public dataset, all driving-relevant traffic elements, such as traffic lights, are mapped in 3D to a reprojection-accurate level with full topological connectivity. Recorded in cities with irregular street layouts and mixed traffic modes, our dataset complements existing datasets by broadening the available geographic diversity. We also introduce four benchmarks, each advancing spatial learning for embodied AI: online HD map construction, long-range depth estimation, novel view synthesis, and end-to-end driving. Project page: https://kitscenes.com/

Richard Schwarzkopf, Fabian Immel, Alexander Blumberg +21

FZI Research Center for Information Technology · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology · University Charles III of Madrid +1

Autonomous Driving Datasets Autonomous Driving Benchmarks End-to-End Autonomous Driving Depth Estimation Autonomous Driving Novel View Synthesis

Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Multimodal Action Diffusion for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) systems have largely converged on predicting intermediate trajectory waypoints, delegating final control to hand-crafted controllers with GPS access. Direct control-signal prediction (outputting throttle, steer and brake in an end-to-end fashion) remains underexplored, and critically, the role of action multimodality in such systems is not well understood. We argue that moving beyond deterministic, single-action outputs is not merely a modelling choice, but a key driver of driving performance, representational quality, and training stability. To validate this, we introduce the Action Diffusion Transformer (ADT), an anchor-free diffusion transformer trained with a MSE objective that natively models the multimodal distribution of plausible driving actions. Rather than committing to a single deterministic command, ADT generates K action candidates and selects the most suitable one at inference via Nearest Neighbour Matching (NNM). Beyond strong benchmark numbers, we show that action multimodality yields measurable benefits in learned representations and behavioral consistency, effects that deterministic architectures cannot replicate. ADT surpasses previous state-of-the-art on the challenging closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark while achieving ten times lower latency, demonstrating that expressive, multimodal action modelling is both practically efficient and conceptually essential for robust end-to-end driving.

Jorge Daniel Rodríguez-Vidal, Diego Porres, Gabriel Villalonga Pineda +1

Computer Vision Center (CVC) Barcelona, Spain · Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Barcelona, Spain

Diffusion Transformer End-to-End Autonomous Driving Diffusion Policy

May 29, 2026cs.RO

Safe2Drive: Evaluating Safe Driving Behaviors of E2E Autonomous Driving Models

Recent end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving policies achieve high driving scores in closed-loop simulations. Yet it remains unclear whether these policies handle common safety-critical scenarios. We present Safe2Drive (S2D), a set of Bench2Drive-aligned scenario extensions focused on three frequent families of road hazards: work zones, pedestrian jaywalking, and occluded vulnerable road users (VRUs). Safe2Drive adds 100 common but challenging scenarios and introduces SafeDriving Score (SDS), a safety-centric metric that augments prior evaluators with pre-crash braking, work zone-object contact, lane centering, and smoothness checks. Evaluating two state-of-the-art policies (LEAD and SimLingo) on S2D, we find that their driving scores drop sharply relative to their reported Bench2Drive baselines (LEAD: from 94.70 DS on Bench2Drive to 39.95 DS on S2D; SimLingo: from 85.07 DS on Bench2Drive to 41.00 DS on S2D) and that SDS on S2D is low (11.85 for LEAD and 15.27 for Sim-Lingo). These results are consistent with brittle safe-driving behaviors such as poor work-zone understanding, red-light violations, and late or absent braking for pedestrians. This study highlights a lack of safe behavioral reasoning in E2E models even when tested on CARLA towns that are part of the training set. We plan to release the code and videos for all 100 S2D scenarios.

Nishad Sahu, Kalpana Panda, Congyuan Yu +3

1Carnegie Mellon University · 2Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani

Autonomous Driving Benchmarks End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Safety Evaluation Autonomous Driving AI Safety Evaluation Autonomous Driving Simulation

May 29, 2026cs.RO

IDOL: Inverse-Dynamics-Guided Future Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a compelling paradigm for learning planning directly from sensor observations, while recent world-model-based approaches further enrich this paradigm by enabling explicit reasoning about how the scene may evolve in the future. Yet future prediction alone does not guarantee better planning unless the predicted evolution can be converted into planning-relevant trajectory updates. Many current methods still forecast future scene states without explicitly decoding the motion implications hidden in state transitions. As a result, future reasoning often remains descriptively useful but only weakly coupled to executable motion generation. To address this limitation, we propose \mathbf{IDOL}, an inverse-dynamics-guided future prediction framework for world-model-based end-to-end planning in latent BEV space, where inverse dynamics serves as the key bridge between future prediction and trajectory optimization. IDOL first predicts multiple future latent scene states with a BEV world model, then applies an inverse dynamics model to adjacent latent futures to decode transition-aware trajectory features and recover planning-relevant motion deltas that explain how the latent world evolves over time. These inverse-dynamics-derived signals are used to optimize the planned trajectory, turning future forecasting from passive scene anticipation into actionable planning guidance. A lightweight closed-loop refinement module further improves long-horizon consistency by reusing the optimized trajectory for another round of future-aware reasoning. By introducing inverse dynamics into latent future reasoning, IDOL tightens the coupling between world modeling and planning. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM v1 and NAVSIM v2 benchmarks show that IDOL achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable methods.

Chenghao Zhang, Timin Li, Dongmei Li

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University

World Model Learning End-to-End Autonomous Driving World Models for Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Planning

May 29, 2026cs.CV

NTR: Neural Token Reconstruction for Scene Token Bottleneck in End-to-End Driving

Recent perception-free end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving methods bypass explicit perception outputs by compressing dense image patch tokens into compact scene tokens for downstream trajectory generation and scoring. While these scene tokens form a compact visual bottleneck for the planner, they receive supervision solely from the planning objective, providing limited constraints on the encoded visual information. To address this limitation, we introduce Neural Token Reconstruction (NTR), a representation learning framework to directly constrain the compact scene-token bottleneck in perception-free driving. NTR introduces a self-distillation masked latent reconstruction objective that reconstructs masked patch-level latent features using only compact scene tokens as reconstruction memory. This forces reconstruction gradients to pass exclusively through the scene-token bottleneck, encouraging scene tokens to preserve richer and less redundant visual representations for planning. We further introduce semantic priors derived from foundation-model annotations as a weak semantic interface biasing reconstruction targets toward driving-related structures without introducing explicit perception heads. All auxiliary reconstruction components are removed at inference time, leaving the deployed planner unchanged. NTR achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public autonomous driving benchmarks, including 8.0461 RFS on Waymo E2E and 94.1 PDMS / 90.9 EPDMS on NavSim1&2. The learned scene tokens exhibit lower pairwise redundancy and higher effective rank, indicating that effective bottleneck supervision improves both compact visual representation learning and planning performance.

Jiahui Li, Jiawei Sun, Zixiang Ren +7

National University of Singapore · Black Sesame Technologies

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning