What Matters for Scalable and Robust Learning in End-to-End Driving Planners?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Holtz, David, Hanselmann, Niklas, Doll, Simon, Cordts, Marius, Schiele, Bernt
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Holtz, David
Hanselmann, Niklas
Doll, Simon
Cordts, Marius
Schiele, Bernt
author_facet Holtz, David
Hanselmann, Niklas
Doll, Simon
Cordts, Marius
Schiele, Bernt
contents End-to-end autonomous driving has gained significant attention for its potential to learn robust behavior in interactive scenarios and scale with data. Popular architectures often build on separate modules for perception and planning connected through latent representations, such as bird's eye view feature grids, to maintain end-to-end differentiability. This paradigm emerged mostly on open-loop datasets, with evaluation focusing not only on driving performance, but also intermediate perception tasks. Unfortunately, architectural advances that excel in open-loop often fail to translate to scalable learning of robust closed-loop driving. In this paper, we systematically re-examine the impact of common architectural patterns on closed-loop performance: (1) high-resolution perceptual representations, (2) disentangled trajectory representations, and (3) generative planning. Crucially, our analysis evaluates the combined impact of these patterns, revealing both unexpected limitations as well as underexplored synergies. Building on these insights, we introduce BevAD, a novel lightweight and highly scalable end-to-end driving architecture. BevAD achieves 72.7% success rate on the Bench2Drive benchmark and demonstrates strong data-scaling behavior using pure imitation learning. Our code and models are publicly available here: https://dmholtz.github.io/bevad/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15185
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Matters for Scalable and Robust Learning in End-to-End Driving Planners?
Holtz, David
Hanselmann, Niklas
Doll, Simon
Cordts, Marius
Schiele, Bernt
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
End-to-end autonomous driving has gained significant attention for its potential to learn robust behavior in interactive scenarios and scale with data. Popular architectures often build on separate modules for perception and planning connected through latent representations, such as bird's eye view feature grids, to maintain end-to-end differentiability. This paradigm emerged mostly on open-loop datasets, with evaluation focusing not only on driving performance, but also intermediate perception tasks. Unfortunately, architectural advances that excel in open-loop often fail to translate to scalable learning of robust closed-loop driving. In this paper, we systematically re-examine the impact of common architectural patterns on closed-loop performance: (1) high-resolution perceptual representations, (2) disentangled trajectory representations, and (3) generative planning. Crucially, our analysis evaluates the combined impact of these patterns, revealing both unexpected limitations as well as underexplored synergies. Building on these insights, we introduce BevAD, a novel lightweight and highly scalable end-to-end driving architecture. BevAD achieves 72.7% success rate on the Bench2Drive benchmark and demonstrates strong data-scaling behavior using pure imitation learning. Our code and models are publicly available here: https://dmholtz.github.io/bevad/
title What Matters for Scalable and Robust Learning in End-to-End Driving Planners?
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15185