Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Zhenxin, Wang, Shihao, Lan, Shiyi, Yu, Zhiding, Wu, Zuxuan, Alvarez, Jose M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Zhenxin
Wang, Shihao
Lan, Shiyi
Yu, Zhiding
Wu, Zuxuan
Alvarez, Jose M.
author_facet Li, Zhenxin
Wang, Shihao
Lan, Shiyi
Yu, Zhiding
Wu, Zuxuan
Alvarez, Jose M.
contents End-to-end autonomous driving research currently faces a critical challenge in bridging the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop deployment. Current approaches are trained to predict trajectories in an open-loop environment, which struggle with quick reactions to other agents in closed-loop environments and risk generating kinematically infeasible plans due to the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving. In this paper, we introduce Hydra-NeXt, a novel multi-branch planning framework that unifies trajectory prediction, control prediction, and a trajectory refinement network in one model. Unlike current open-loop trajectory prediction models that only handle general-case planning, Hydra-NeXt further utilizes a control decoder to focus on short-term actions, which enables faster responses to dynamic situations and reactive agents. Moreover, we propose the Trajectory Refinement module to augment and refine the planning decisions by effectively adhering to kinematic constraints in closed-loop environments. This unified approach bridges the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving, demonstrating superior performance of 65.89 Driving Score (DS) and 48.20% Success Rate (SR) on the Bench2Drive dataset without relying on external experts for data collection. Hydra-NeXt surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 22.98 DS and 17.49 SR, marking a significant advancement in autonomous driving. Code will be available at https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/Hydra-NeXt.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_12030
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Training
Li, Zhenxin
Wang, Shihao
Lan, Shiyi
Yu, Zhiding
Wu, Zuxuan
Alvarez, Jose M.
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
End-to-end autonomous driving research currently faces a critical challenge in bridging the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop deployment. Current approaches are trained to predict trajectories in an open-loop environment, which struggle with quick reactions to other agents in closed-loop environments and risk generating kinematically infeasible plans due to the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving. In this paper, we introduce Hydra-NeXt, a novel multi-branch planning framework that unifies trajectory prediction, control prediction, and a trajectory refinement network in one model. Unlike current open-loop trajectory prediction models that only handle general-case planning, Hydra-NeXt further utilizes a control decoder to focus on short-term actions, which enables faster responses to dynamic situations and reactive agents. Moreover, we propose the Trajectory Refinement module to augment and refine the planning decisions by effectively adhering to kinematic constraints in closed-loop environments. This unified approach bridges the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving, demonstrating superior performance of 65.89 Driving Score (DS) and 48.20% Success Rate (SR) on the Bench2Drive dataset without relying on external experts for data collection. Hydra-NeXt surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 22.98 DS and 17.49 SR, marking a significant advancement in autonomous driving. Code will be available at https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/Hydra-NeXt.
title Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Training
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12030