The paper studies how Bird's‑Eye‑View (BEV) maps predicted by Cross‑View Transformers (CVT) can be used directly as inputs to a Behavior‑Cloning (BC) driving policy in the CARLA simulator. It introduces a six‑channel BEV representation and a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) weighting scheme to focus learning on underrepresented maneuvers. Closed‑loop tests show that the KDE‑weighted model is the only predicted‑BEV agent to finish an episode without infractions, highlighting that global segmentation scores are poor proxies for driving performance and that prediction quality at critical geometries, especially the route channel, is key to reliable navigation.
By Felipe Carlos dos Santos, Eric Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto
arXiv:2607. 13028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training robust autonomous driving agents requires a simulator that is fast enough for reinforcement learning at scale, realistic enough to ground behavior in real-world map structure, and diverse enough to cover the safety-critical long tail that logged data rarely contains.
By Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Weixin Li, Wei-Jer Chang, Zachary Lee, Tim Wang, Wei Zhan
The paper introduces CoLT-Drive, a 3,536-sample counterfactual long‑tail benchmark for evaluating decision‑level driving affordance prediction, which tests whether models can infer how rare objects affect an ego vehicle’s high‑level actions. It also proposes KPA, a knowledge‑preserving adaptation framework that combines structured prompting, expert merging, and a regime‑aware LoRA mixture‑of‑experts module to improve small VLMs on driving tasks. Experiments show KPA achieves 60.8% pair accuracy on CoLT‑Drive, outperforming the Qwen3‑VL‑2B baseline and LoRA SFT while keeping competitive in‑domain performance.
By Zhengxu Tang, Guofeng Cui, Ziyu Gong, Xiaozhou Zhang, Ruifeng Deng, Chengzhi Qi, Ke Chen, Sachin Patil, Tianjun Xiao, Langechuan Liu, Pichao Wang
arXiv:2608.22549v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Batched simulators for autonomous driving have recently enabled training reinforcement learning (RL) agents at scale, encompassing thousands of traffic...
By Cevahir Koprulu, David Paz, Feng Tao, Yuliang Guo, Xinyu Huang, Ufuk Topcu, Liu Ren
arXiv:2507.06529v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful paradigm for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Traditional BO methods typically rely on separate h...
By Fengxue Zhang, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2606. 26424v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory forecasting for autonomous driving has advanced rapidly, yet representative models often produce uninformative posteriors over forecast modes, causing problems for mode pruning.
By Qiyuan Wu, Katie Z Luo, Bharath Hariharan, Wei-Lun Chao, Mark Campbell
arXiv:2606. 31844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A local-to-global context mismatch arises when autoregressive traffic simulators trained on ego-centric driving logs are deployed in globally observable closed-loop environments.
By Ziyan Wang, Tan Xiang, Peng Chen, Xintao Yan
arXiv:2608. 01130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A broad range of models face the mismatch where they are updated through trajectory losses but are evaluated by downstream task reward.
By Yuyang Shen
The paper introduces Closed-Loop Aware Planning for Autonomous Driving (CLAP‑AD), a new planning head that learns a driving path via imitation while independently scoring candidate speeds using a learned function guided by safety constraints. Unlike traditional open‑loop imitation learning, CLAP‑AD allows explicit test‑time control over speed selection without requiring speed‑conditioned training. Experiments on Bench2Drive‑Speed, Bench2Drive, and NAVSIM v2 demonstrate significant improvements in speed‑adherence and overall driving performance compared to state‑of‑the‑art baselines.
By Emad Aghajanzadeh, Thomas Schwarzfischer, Marc Kaufeld, Moritz Thoma, Ryan P\'egoud, Manoj Rohit Vemparala, Pierpaolo Mori, Nael Fasfous, Johannes Betz, Daniel Mueller-Gritschneder, Ulf Schlichtmann
arXiv:2610.35448v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: End-to-end driving models perform well on standard benchmarks but collide frequently in safety-critical scenarios. We present a failure-mode analysis...
By Khaled M. Seyam (University of Stuttgart, Germany), Julian Wiederer (Mercedes-Benz AG, Germany), Samar Fathalah (University of Stuttgart, Germany), Markus Braun (Mercedes-Benz AG, Germany), Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
arXiv:2607. 07844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While closed-loop motion planners trained on large-scale, object-level datasets, e.
By Alessandro Canevaro, Hang Yu, Julian Schmidt, Peizheng Li, Silvan Lindner, Wilhelm Stork, Georg Martius, Julian Jordan
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