Scaling Laws of Motion Forecasting and Planning -- Technical Report

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Main Authors: Baniodeh, Mustafa, Goel, Kratarth, Ettinger, Scott, Fuertes, Carlos, Seff, Ari, Shen, Tim, Gulino, Cole, Yang, Chenjie, Jerfel, Ghassen, Choe, Dokook, Wang, Rui, Charrow, Benjamin, Kallem, Vinutha, Casas, Sergio, Al-Rfou, Rami, Sapp, Benjamin, Anguelov, Dragomir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Baniodeh, Mustafa
Goel, Kratarth
Ettinger, Scott
Fuertes, Carlos
Seff, Ari
Shen, Tim
Gulino, Cole
Yang, Chenjie
Jerfel, Ghassen
Choe, Dokook
Wang, Rui
Charrow, Benjamin
Kallem, Vinutha
Casas, Sergio
Al-Rfou, Rami
Sapp, Benjamin
Anguelov, Dragomir
author_facet Baniodeh, Mustafa
Goel, Kratarth
Ettinger, Scott
Fuertes, Carlos
Seff, Ari
Shen, Tim
Gulino, Cole
Yang, Chenjie
Jerfel, Ghassen
Choe, Dokook
Wang, Rui
Charrow, Benjamin
Kallem, Vinutha
Casas, Sergio
Al-Rfou, Rami
Sapp, Benjamin
Anguelov, Dragomir
contents We study the empirical scaling laws of a family of encoder-decoder autoregressive transformer models on the task of joint motion forecasting and planning in the autonomous driving domain. Using a 500 thousand hours driving dataset, we demonstrate that, similar to language modeling, model performance improves as a power-law function of the total compute budget, and we observe a strong correlation between model training loss and model evaluation metrics. Most interestingly, closed-loop metrics also improve with scaling, which has important implications for the suitability of open-loop metrics for model development and hill climbing. We also study the optimal scaling of the number of transformer parameters and the training data size for a training compute-optimal model. We find that as the training compute budget grows, optimal scaling requires increasing the model size 1.5x as fast as the dataset size. We also study inference-time compute scaling, where we observe that sampling and clustering the output of smaller models makes them competitive with larger models, up to a crossover point beyond which a larger models becomes more inference-compute efficient. Overall, our experimental results demonstrate that optimizing the training and inference-time scaling properties of motion forecasting and planning models is a key lever for improving their performance to address a wide variety of driving scenarios. Finally, we briefly study the utility of training on general logged driving data of other agents to improve the performance of the ego-agent, an important research area to address the scarcity of robotics data for large capacity models training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08228
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling Laws of Motion Forecasting and Planning -- Technical Report
Baniodeh, Mustafa
Goel, Kratarth
Ettinger, Scott
Fuertes, Carlos
Seff, Ari
Shen, Tim
Gulino, Cole
Yang, Chenjie
Jerfel, Ghassen
Choe, Dokook
Wang, Rui
Charrow, Benjamin
Kallem, Vinutha
Casas, Sergio
Al-Rfou, Rami
Sapp, Benjamin
Anguelov, Dragomir
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
We study the empirical scaling laws of a family of encoder-decoder autoregressive transformer models on the task of joint motion forecasting and planning in the autonomous driving domain. Using a 500 thousand hours driving dataset, we demonstrate that, similar to language modeling, model performance improves as a power-law function of the total compute budget, and we observe a strong correlation between model training loss and model evaluation metrics. Most interestingly, closed-loop metrics also improve with scaling, which has important implications for the suitability of open-loop metrics for model development and hill climbing. We also study the optimal scaling of the number of transformer parameters and the training data size for a training compute-optimal model. We find that as the training compute budget grows, optimal scaling requires increasing the model size 1.5x as fast as the dataset size. We also study inference-time compute scaling, where we observe that sampling and clustering the output of smaller models makes them competitive with larger models, up to a crossover point beyond which a larger models becomes more inference-compute efficient. Overall, our experimental results demonstrate that optimizing the training and inference-time scaling properties of motion forecasting and planning models is a key lever for improving their performance to address a wide variety of driving scenarios. Finally, we briefly study the utility of training on general logged driving data of other agents to improve the performance of the ego-agent, an important research area to address the scarcity of robotics data for large capacity models training.
title Scaling Laws of Motion Forecasting and Planning -- Technical Report
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08228