Risk-Aware World Model Predictive Control for Generalizable End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sun, Jiangxin, Xue, Feng, Long, Teng, Liu, Chang, Hu, Jian-Fang, Zheng, Wei-Shi, Sebe, Nicu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Sun, Jiangxin
Xue, Feng
Long, Teng
Liu, Chang
Hu, Jian-Fang
Zheng, Wei-Shi
Sebe, Nicu
author_facet Sun, Jiangxin
Xue, Feng
Long, Teng
Liu, Chang
Hu, Jian-Fang
Zheng, Wei-Shi
Sebe, Nicu
contents With advances in imitation learning (IL) and large-scale driving datasets, end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has made great progress recently. Currently, IL-based methods have become a mainstream paradigm: models rely on standard driving behaviors given by experts, and learn to minimize the discrepancy between their actions and expert actions. However, this objective of "only driving like the expert" suffers from limited generalization: when encountering rare or unseen long-tail scenarios outside the distribution of expert demonstrations, models tend to produce unsafe decisions in the absence of prior experience. This raises a fundamental question: Can an E2E-AD system make reliable decisions without any expert action supervision? Motivated by this, we propose a unified framework named Risk-aware World Model Predictive Control (RaWMPC) to address this generalization dilemma through robust control, without reliance on expert demonstrations. Practically, RaWMPC leverages a world model to predict the consequences of multiple candidate actions and selects low-risk actions through explicit risk evaluation. To endow the world model with the ability to predict the outcomes of risky driving behaviors, we design a risk-aware interaction strategy that systematically exposes the world model to hazardous behaviors, making catastrophic outcomes predictable and thus avoidable. Furthermore, to generate low-risk candidate actions at test time, we introduce a self-evaluation distillation method to distill riskavoidance capabilities from the well-trained world model into a generative action proposal network without any expert demonstration. Extensive experiments show that RaWMPC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios, while providing superior decision interpretability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_23259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Risk-Aware World Model Predictive Control for Generalizable End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Sun, Jiangxin
Xue, Feng
Long, Teng
Liu, Chang
Hu, Jian-Fang
Zheng, Wei-Shi
Sebe, Nicu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
With advances in imitation learning (IL) and large-scale driving datasets, end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has made great progress recently. Currently, IL-based methods have become a mainstream paradigm: models rely on standard driving behaviors given by experts, and learn to minimize the discrepancy between their actions and expert actions. However, this objective of "only driving like the expert" suffers from limited generalization: when encountering rare or unseen long-tail scenarios outside the distribution of expert demonstrations, models tend to produce unsafe decisions in the absence of prior experience. This raises a fundamental question: Can an E2E-AD system make reliable decisions without any expert action supervision? Motivated by this, we propose a unified framework named Risk-aware World Model Predictive Control (RaWMPC) to address this generalization dilemma through robust control, without reliance on expert demonstrations. Practically, RaWMPC leverages a world model to predict the consequences of multiple candidate actions and selects low-risk actions through explicit risk evaluation. To endow the world model with the ability to predict the outcomes of risky driving behaviors, we design a risk-aware interaction strategy that systematically exposes the world model to hazardous behaviors, making catastrophic outcomes predictable and thus avoidable. Furthermore, to generate low-risk candidate actions at test time, we introduce a self-evaluation distillation method to distill riskavoidance capabilities from the well-trained world model into a generative action proposal network without any expert demonstration. Extensive experiments show that RaWMPC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios, while providing superior decision interpretability.
title Risk-Aware World Model Predictive Control for Generalizable End-to-End Autonomous Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23259