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: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
arXiv:2609.06433v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The generation of safety-critical traffic scenarios is essential for training and evaluating autonomous vehicles. Prior approaches typically perturb...
By Taehyung Kim, Jongeun Choi
arXiv:2605.21139v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Current end-to-end autonomous driving models are fundamentally constrained by the behavioral cloning ceiling of imitation learning. While rei...
By Yang Wu, Qiang Meng, Zhaojiang Liu, Youquan Liu, Jian Yang, Jin Xie
arXiv:2608. 10403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising performance in autonomous driving, yet ensuring the safety of online RL policies remains challenging due to insufficient exposure to safety-critical driving scenes.
By Xincong Hu (Nanjing University), Lei Ou (Nanjing University), Maosen Li (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Jingtao Zhang (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Liguo Hou (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Zongzhang Zhang (Nanjing University)
OPTED is a method for on‑policy fine‑tuning of end‑to‑end driving models that separates reinforcement learning from the policy update. A privileged teacher trained with RL on vectorized inputs (HD‑maps and bounding boxes) supervises the pre‑trained student during closed‑loop post‑training. Applied to the camera‑based models TransFuser and VaVAM in AlpaSim, OPTED boosts driving scores by 1.6× and 9.5×, respectively, while requiring roughly three orders of magnitude fewer simulator interactions than direct RL post‑training.
By Damiano Da Col, Maximilian Igl, Peter Karkus, Kashyap Chitta, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Konrad Schindler, Christos Sakaridis
arXiv:2611.06007v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Motorized Two-Wheelers (MTWs) dominate personal transport across much of the Global South, yet remain largely overlooked in predictive perception resea...
By Varun A. Paturkar, Shankar Gangisetty, C. V. Jawahar
FPD-Drive is an end‑to‑end autonomous driving planner that uses future‑privileged multi‑target distillation to transfer diverse, high‑quality trajectory targets from a teacher model with access to future observations to a student policy. It also introduces safety‑aware score correction to improve candidate selection by adjusting rankings between safe and unsafe trajectories. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks and demonstrates strong zero‑shot closed‑loop results on HUGSIM.
By Li-Heng Chen, Qifeng Chen, Chengwei Wu, Yingjie Zhang, Sheng Yang, Hongbo Fu, Shaoqing Ren
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
arXiv:2604.19710v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models bring rich world knowledge and reasoning capabilities to autonomous driving. However, most driving VLAs are tra...
By Zewei Zhou, Ruining Yang, Xuewei Qi, Yiluan Guo, Sherry X. Chen, Tao Feng, Kateryna Pistunova, Yishan Shen, Lili Su, Jiaqi Ma
arXiv:2606. 06423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety-critical traffic scenario generation is essential for evaluating autonomous driving systems under rare but high-risk interactions.
By Qi Lan, Yining Tang, Yu Shen, Yi Zhou, Yuhao Wei, Jie Li, Guofa Li
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