arXiv AI
Sep 28

Guiding End-to-End Driving Models with Endpoint-Constrained Trajectory Optimization

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 Computer Vision
Sep 3

Designing Versatile Samples for Learned Trajectory Scoring

The paper proposes a new training dataset that generates more informative positive and negative samples for trajectory scoring in autonomous driving. By perturbing logged human trajectories laterally toward the drivable boundary and longitudinally toward a leading vehicle, the dataset provides richer supervision than the planner’s default proposal pool. Using a transformer-based scorer trained on this dataset, the authors achieve improved EPDMS scores on two frozen planners, DiffusionDrive and MeanFuser, when evaluated on the NAVSIM navtrain dataset.

By Yaguang Li, Jiaru Zhang, Chuheng Wei, Can Cui, Ziran Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

PlanWAM: Planning-Shaped Future Representations for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

PlanWAM introduces a Planning‑Shaped World Action Model that tailors future‑state representations to be most useful for trajectory planning in end‑to‑end autonomous driving. It compresses historical observations with a Temporal Register Pyramid, shapes a future latent representation using a privileged posterior branch guided by planning objectives, and distills this into a prior branch that predicts the representation from history alone. The resulting foresighted planning context yields state‑of‑the‑art performance on NAVSIM and HUGSIM benchmarks.

By Jinchang Xu, Hongda Yu, Fengwei Dong, Wenhui Huang, Xi Wei, Yongzhi Liu, Sunan Zhang, Jirao Wang, Chen Lv, Bingbing Li, Guodong Yin, Weichao Zhuang