DriveSafer: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Safety Guidance

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sural, Shounak, Rajkumar, Raj
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sural, Shounak
Rajkumar, Raj
author_facet Sural, Shounak
Rajkumar, Raj
contents End-to-End (E2E) autonomous driving models have shown growing capability in recent years, with performance improving on increasingly challenging benchmarks. However, modern generative E2E planners still suffer from a substantial number of catastrophic failures in safety-critical scenarios. We find that many such failures arise from violations of physical constraints and safety requirements, leading to unsafe behavior. Motivated by this finding, in this paper, we focus on improving safety outcomes in generative end-to-end driving with a targeted reduction of catastrophic planning failures, instead of enhancing average planning quality. Towards this end, we propose DriveSafer, a failure-aware safety framework for end-to-end planners. DriveSafer explicitly steers generative planners towards safe behaviors leveraging both training-time safety constraints and inference-time safety guidance. Compared to the state-of-the-art DiffusionDrive model, on the NAVSIM benchmark, DriveSafer reduces the number of catastrophic failures (PDMS=0) by 48%, with over 65% reduction in drivable-area compliance failures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16737
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DriveSafer: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Safety Guidance
Sural, Shounak
Rajkumar, Raj
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
End-to-End (E2E) autonomous driving models have shown growing capability in recent years, with performance improving on increasingly challenging benchmarks. However, modern generative E2E planners still suffer from a substantial number of catastrophic failures in safety-critical scenarios. We find that many such failures arise from violations of physical constraints and safety requirements, leading to unsafe behavior. Motivated by this finding, in this paper, we focus on improving safety outcomes in generative end-to-end driving with a targeted reduction of catastrophic planning failures, instead of enhancing average planning quality. Towards this end, we propose DriveSafer, a failure-aware safety framework for end-to-end planners. DriveSafer explicitly steers generative planners towards safe behaviors leveraging both training-time safety constraints and inference-time safety guidance. Compared to the state-of-the-art DiffusionDrive model, on the NAVSIM benchmark, DriveSafer reduces the number of catastrophic failures (PDMS=0) by 48%, with over 65% reduction in drivable-area compliance failures.
title DriveSafer: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Safety Guidance
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16737