The paper introduces Endpoint-Constrained Optimization (ECO), a lightweight postprocessing layer that corrects intermediate waypoints of end-to-end driving policies while preserving the predicted endpoint. ECO does not require maps, privileged simulator state, or additional training, and can be applied to a wide range of waypoint-emitting policies. Experiments on two closed-loop simulators show that ECO significantly improves closed-loop performance, achieving top results in the HUGSIM Closed-Loop Driving Challenge and boosting scene scores on AlpaSim.
By Brayden Zhang, Mahsa Golchoubian, Igor Gilitschenski, Boris Ivanovic, Kashyap Chitta
ForeDrive introduces a planning-relevant latent world model that is asymmetrically coupled to a Diffusion Transformer planner. The model learns multi‑horizon latent futures with a JEPA‑style world model, while planning gradients update the shared encoder and stop‑gradient routing trains the predictor with forecasting losses only. Gated visual fusion, future‑status injection, and Trajectory‑Adaptive Bias are used to guide trajectory generation without overriding current observations, achieving high performance on NAVSIM benchmarks using only front‑view images and pure imitation learning.
By Sinuo Wang, Zichong Gu, Yuhan Huang, Wenxin Wen, Xun Yang, Yiqing Zhang, Xingyu Zhang, Ningyu Che, Jie Ling, Qiankun Yu, Wei Liu, Jing Xu, Xinggang Wang
arXiv:2606. 11019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based motion planners, despite recent progress, often suffer from temporal inconsistency.
By Zehan Zhang, Neng Zhang, Yaoyi Li, Jia Cai, Zhiling Wang
arXiv:2608.30122v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) driving methods increasingly combine multi-trajectory imitation learning with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO),...
By Tian Zhang, Zhuo Huang, Hongrui Ye, Yu Wu, Zengmao Wang, Kaixuan Zhou
DA‑WAM is a framework that integrates predictive representation learning, action‑conditioned future modeling, and trajectory scoring into a single decision‑making objective for autonomous driving. It uses an online encoder with a stable momentum target to keep future representations aligned with the driving task, generating a distinct future latent for each trajectory candidate. A future‑latent‑conditioned scorer evaluates these latents, with expert‑matched trajectories supervised by observed futures and safety‑critical hard negatives providing additional guidance, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on NAVSIM‑v1 and NAVSIM‑v2.
By Ruiguo Zhong, Benshan Ma, Xiaolong Chen, Lang Zhang, Mingyue Feng, Yaonong Wang, Pei Liu, Jun Ma
Learning-based motion planners, despite recent progress, often suffer from temporal inconsistency. Small perturbations across frames can accumulate into unstable trajectories, degrading comfort and safety in closed-loop driving.
The paper presents a single pretrained diffusion traffic model that serves both as an ego motion planner and as a controllable generator of safety‑critical scenarios for autonomous driving. It introduces a Single‑Stream Dual‑Stream diffusion‑transformer decoder (SSDS) that fuses scene context via joint attention, improving closed‑loop performance on the nuPlan benchmark, and a training‑free guidance scheme called Decoupled Annealing Posterior Sampling with Energy (DAPSE) that injects arbitrary energy functions at inference time. Using the same model, the authors generate realistic long‑tail driving interactions—such as aggressive cut‑ins and lead‑vehicle braking—through inference‑time guidance, exposing failure modes in black‑box planners that standard benchmarks miss.
By Arka Pal, Rajesh Kumar, Hannes Eriksson, R\'emi Lacombe, Arvid Laveno Ling, Ankit Gupta, Maciej Wozniak
arXiv:2608. 14125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LeWM is a lightweight visual world model that learns latent dynamics end-to-end from pixels and ranks candidate action sequences by the distance between their predicted endpoints and the goal.
By Xiaodi Huang, Ziyi Ding, Jingtian Wan, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zhang, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Jiayu Chen, Zhang Zhang, Tao Huang
The paper presents a comparative study of motion planning methods from major autonomous driving benchmarks—CARLA, nuPlan, and the Waymo Open Dataset—using CARLA Leaderboard v2.1 as a unified evaluation platform. Eight representative planners (TF++, InterFuser, TCP, PDM‑Lite, MTR+MPC, CaRL, PlanT 2.0, Diffusion planner) are evaluated to highlight their strengths, weaknesses, prevailing trends, and common challenges in motion planning research.
By Merve Atasever, Alfredo Reina Corona, Zhuochen Liu, Qingpei Li, Akshay Hitendra Shah, Hans Walker, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh, Rahul Jain
arXiv:2606.27504v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) unify future environment prediction with action generation for autonomous driving, yet existing approaches optimize only...
By Tianze Xia, Lijun Zhou, Kaixin Xiong, Jingfeng Yao, Zhenxin Zhu, Haiyang Sun, Bing Wang, Guang Chen, Wenyu Liu, Hangjun Ye, Xinggang Wang
arXiv:2602. 07339v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based trajectory planners can model multi-modal driving behavior, but their iterative denoising process introduces a latency bottleneck for real-time closed-loop deployment.
By Ruturaj Reddy, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Junn Yong Loo, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Ganesh Krishnasamy
arXiv:2609.22762v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Generative world-action models (WAMs) jointly generate future video and vehicle actions, while their action branches remain primarily optimized by expe...
By Fengcheng Yu, Dhruv Parikh, Junjie Ye, Maulik Bhatt, Thang Vu, Igor Vasiljevic, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang