Perfect Prediction or Plenty of Proposals? What Matters Most in Planning for Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Distelzweig, Aron, Janjoš, Faris, Scheel, Oliver, Varra, Sirish Reddy, Rajan, Raghu, Boedecker, Joschka
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866914098332041216
author Distelzweig, Aron
Janjoš, Faris
Scheel, Oliver
Varra, Sirish Reddy
Rajan, Raghu
Boedecker, Joschka
author_facet Distelzweig, Aron
Janjoš, Faris
Scheel, Oliver
Varra, Sirish Reddy
Rajan, Raghu
Boedecker, Joschka
contents Traditionally, prediction and planning in autonomous driving (AD) have been treated as separate, sequential modules. Recently, there has been a growing shift towards tighter integration of these components, known as Integrated Prediction and Planning (IPP), with the aim of enabling more informed and adaptive decision-making. However, it remains unclear to what extent this integration actually improves planning performance. In this work, we investigate the role of prediction in IPP approaches, drawing on the widely adopted Val14 benchmark, which encompasses more common driving scenarios with relatively low interaction complexity, and the interPlan benchmark, which includes highly interactive and out-of-distribution driving situations. Our analysis reveals that even access to perfect future predictions does not lead to better planning outcomes, indicating that current IPP methods often fail to fully exploit future behavior information. Instead, we focus on high-quality proposal generation, while using predictions primarily for collision checks. We find that many imitation learning-based planners struggle to generate realistic and plausible proposals, performing worse than PDM - a simple lane-following approach. Motivated by this observation, we build on PDM with an enhanced proposal generation method, shifting the emphasis towards producing diverse but realistic and high-quality proposals. This proposal-centric approach significantly outperforms existing methods, especially in out-of-distribution and highly interactive settings, where it sets new state-of-the-art results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Perfect Prediction or Plenty of Proposals? What Matters Most in Planning for Autonomous Driving
Distelzweig, Aron
Janjoš, Faris
Scheel, Oliver
Varra, Sirish Reddy
Rajan, Raghu
Boedecker, Joschka
Robotics
Traditionally, prediction and planning in autonomous driving (AD) have been treated as separate, sequential modules. Recently, there has been a growing shift towards tighter integration of these components, known as Integrated Prediction and Planning (IPP), with the aim of enabling more informed and adaptive decision-making. However, it remains unclear to what extent this integration actually improves planning performance. In this work, we investigate the role of prediction in IPP approaches, drawing on the widely adopted Val14 benchmark, which encompasses more common driving scenarios with relatively low interaction complexity, and the interPlan benchmark, which includes highly interactive and out-of-distribution driving situations. Our analysis reveals that even access to perfect future predictions does not lead to better planning outcomes, indicating that current IPP methods often fail to fully exploit future behavior information. Instead, we focus on high-quality proposal generation, while using predictions primarily for collision checks. We find that many imitation learning-based planners struggle to generate realistic and plausible proposals, performing worse than PDM - a simple lane-following approach. Motivated by this observation, we build on PDM with an enhanced proposal generation method, shifting the emphasis towards producing diverse but realistic and high-quality proposals. This proposal-centric approach significantly outperforms existing methods, especially in out-of-distribution and highly interactive settings, where it sets new state-of-the-art results.
title Perfect Prediction or Plenty of Proposals? What Matters Most in Planning for Autonomous Driving
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15505