Multimodal Action Diffusion for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Rodríguez-Vidal, Jorge Daniel, Porres, Diego, Pineda, Gabriel Villalonga, Peña, Antonio M. López
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Rodríguez-Vidal, Jorge Daniel
Porres, Diego
Pineda, Gabriel Villalonga
Peña, Antonio M. López
author_facet Rodríguez-Vidal, Jorge Daniel
Porres, Diego
Pineda, Gabriel Villalonga
Peña, Antonio M. López
contents End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) systems have largely converged on predicting intermediate trajectory waypoints, delegating final control to hand-crafted controllers with GPS access. Direct control-signal prediction (outputting throttle, steer and brake in an end-to-end fashion) remains underexplored, and critically, the role of action multimodality in such systems is not well understood. We argue that moving beyond deterministic, single-action outputs is not merely a modelling choice, but a key driver of driving performance, representational quality, and training stability. To validate this, we introduce the Action Diffusion Transformer (ADT), an anchor-free diffusion transformer trained with a MSE objective that natively models the multimodal distribution of plausible driving actions. Rather than committing to a single deterministic command, ADT generates K action candidates and selects the most suitable one at inference via Nearest Neighbour Matching (NNM). Beyond strong benchmark numbers, we show that action multimodality yields measurable benefits in learned representations and behavioral consistency, effects that deterministic architectures cannot replicate. ADT surpasses previous state-of-the-art on the challenging closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark while achieving ten times lower latency, demonstrating that expressive, multimodal action modelling is both practically efficient and conceptually essential for robust end-to-end driving.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_02105
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Action Diffusion for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Rodríguez-Vidal, Jorge Daniel
Porres, Diego
Pineda, Gabriel Villalonga
Peña, Antonio M. López
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) systems have largely converged on predicting intermediate trajectory waypoints, delegating final control to hand-crafted controllers with GPS access. Direct control-signal prediction (outputting throttle, steer and brake in an end-to-end fashion) remains underexplored, and critically, the role of action multimodality in such systems is not well understood. We argue that moving beyond deterministic, single-action outputs is not merely a modelling choice, but a key driver of driving performance, representational quality, and training stability. To validate this, we introduce the Action Diffusion Transformer (ADT), an anchor-free diffusion transformer trained with a MSE objective that natively models the multimodal distribution of plausible driving actions. Rather than committing to a single deterministic command, ADT generates K action candidates and selects the most suitable one at inference via Nearest Neighbour Matching (NNM). Beyond strong benchmark numbers, we show that action multimodality yields measurable benefits in learned representations and behavioral consistency, effects that deterministic architectures cannot replicate. ADT surpasses previous state-of-the-art on the challenging closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark while achieving ten times lower latency, demonstrating that expressive, multimodal action modelling is both practically efficient and conceptually essential for robust end-to-end driving.
title Multimodal Action Diffusion for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02105