LEAD: Minimizing Learner-Expert Asymmetry in End-to-End Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Nguyen, Long, Fauth, Micha, Jaeger, Bernhard, Dauner, Daniel, Igl, Maximilian, Geiger, Andreas, Chitta, Kashyap
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Nguyen, Long
Fauth, Micha
Jaeger, Bernhard
Dauner, Daniel
Igl, Maximilian
Geiger, Andreas
Chitta, Kashyap
author_facet Nguyen, Long
Fauth, Micha
Jaeger, Bernhard
Dauner, Daniel
Igl, Maximilian
Geiger, Andreas
Chitta, Kashyap
contents Simulators can generate virtually unlimited driving data, yet imitation learning policies in simulation still struggle to achieve robust closed-loop performance. Motivated by this gap, we empirically study how misalignment between privileged expert demonstrations and sensor-based student observations can limit the effectiveness of imitation learning. More precisely, experts have significantly higher visibility (e.g., ignoring occlusions) and far lower uncertainty (e.g., knowing other vehicles' actions), making them difficult to imitate reliably. Furthermore, navigational intent (i.e., the route to follow) is under-specified in student models at test time via only a single target point. We demonstrate that these asymmetries can measurably limit driving performance in CARLA and offer practical interventions to address them. After careful modifications to narrow the gaps between expert and student, our TransFuser v6 (TFv6) student policy achieves a new state of the art on all major publicly available CARLA closed-loop benchmarks, reaching 95 DS on Bench2Drive and more than doubling prior performances on Longest6~v2 and Town13. Additionally, by integrating perception supervision from our dataset into a shared sim-to-real pipeline, we show consistent gains on the NAVSIM and Waymo Vision-Based End-to-End driving benchmarks. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/lead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20563
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LEAD: Minimizing Learner-Expert Asymmetry in End-to-End Driving
Nguyen, Long
Fauth, Micha
Jaeger, Bernhard
Dauner, Daniel
Igl, Maximilian
Geiger, Andreas
Chitta, Kashyap
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
Simulators can generate virtually unlimited driving data, yet imitation learning policies in simulation still struggle to achieve robust closed-loop performance. Motivated by this gap, we empirically study how misalignment between privileged expert demonstrations and sensor-based student observations can limit the effectiveness of imitation learning. More precisely, experts have significantly higher visibility (e.g., ignoring occlusions) and far lower uncertainty (e.g., knowing other vehicles' actions), making them difficult to imitate reliably. Furthermore, navigational intent (i.e., the route to follow) is under-specified in student models at test time via only a single target point. We demonstrate that these asymmetries can measurably limit driving performance in CARLA and offer practical interventions to address them. After careful modifications to narrow the gaps between expert and student, our TransFuser v6 (TFv6) student policy achieves a new state of the art on all major publicly available CARLA closed-loop benchmarks, reaching 95 DS on Bench2Drive and more than doubling prior performances on Longest6~v2 and Town13. Additionally, by integrating perception supervision from our dataset into a shared sim-to-real pipeline, we show consistent gains on the NAVSIM and Waymo Vision-Based End-to-End driving benchmarks. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/lead.
title LEAD: Minimizing Learner-Expert Asymmetry in End-to-End Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20563