arXiv AI

TaCarla: A comprehensive benchmarking dataset for end-to-end autonomous driving

arXiv:2602. 23499v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Collecting a high-quality dataset is a critical task that demands meticulous attention to detail, as overlooking certain aspects can render the entire dataset unusable.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Plug-and-Play Traffic Element Awareness for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces a plug‑and‑play method that injects traffic‑element signals—such as traffic lights and road signs—into end‑to‑end autonomous driving models with minimal architectural changes. By augmenting several public datasets with comprehensive traffic‑element annotations, the authors evaluate this integration across diverse driving paradigms, consistently improving performance on nuScenes, NAVSIM‑v1, NAVSIM‑v2, and Bench2Drive. The approach achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art result on the challenging NAVSIM‑v2 benchmark, demonstrating the broad utility of traffic‑element awareness.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

MILER: Semantic Mid-Level Representation for Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning in Unstructured Autonomous Driving

MILER is an end‑to‑end reinforcement learning framework that achieves zero‑shot sim‑to‑real transfer for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. It uses a custom semantic mid‑level representation (MLR) simulator for offline training, and during deployment it processes real camera and LiDAR data with BEVFusion to produce a compatible bird’s‑eye‑view representation. The policy’s actions are applied via a trajectory‑alignment strategy, allowing the system to drive 17.3 km on a 3.0 km test track without human intervention, all running on a Jetson AGX Orin.

By Thomas Steinecker, Denis Trescher, Alexander Bienemann, Thorsten Luettel, Mirko Maehlisch
arXiv AI
Sep 2

CoLT-Drive: Counterfactual Long-Tail Benchmarking and Knowledge-Preserving Adaptation for Driving Affordance Prediction

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 AI
Jun 2

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Model

arXiv:2512. 05277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.

By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
arXiv AI
Jun 4

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding for Agentic Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2512. 05277v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.

By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
arXiv AI
Jun 17

DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 17362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent.

By Xinglong Sun, Kevin Xie, Jenny Schmalfuss, Despoina Paschalidou, Xiuming Zhang, Sanja Fidler, Kashyap Chitta, Jose M. Alvarez
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Benchmarking Autonomous Driving Planners Across Leaderboards: A Unified CARLA-Based Evaluation

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