Hidden Biases of End-to-End Driving Models

End-to-end driving systems have recently made rapid progress, in particular on CARLA. Independent of their major contribution, they introduce changes to minor system components. Consequently, the source of improvements is unclear. We identify two biases that recur in nearly all state-of-the-art methods and are critical for the observed progress on CARLA: (1) lateral recovery via a strong inductive bias towards target point following, and (2) longitudinal averaging of multimodal waypoint predictions for slowing down. We investigate the drawbacks of these biases and identify principled alternatives. By incorporating our insights, we develop TF++, a simple end-to-end method that ranks first on the Longest6 and LAV benchmarks, gaining 11 driving score over the best prior work on Longest6.Comment: Accepted at ICCV 2023. Camera ready versio

Quadtree Generating Networks: Efficient Hierarchical Scene Parsing with Sparse Convolutions

Semantic segmentation with Convolutional Neural Networks is a memory-intensive task due to the high spatial resolution of feature maps and output predictions. In this paper, we present Quadtree Generating Networks (QGNs), a novel approach able to drastically reduce the memory footprint of modern semantic segmentation networks. The key idea is to use quadtrees to represent the predictions and target segmentation masks instead of dense pixel grids. Our quadtree representation enables hierarchical processing of an input image, with the most computationally demanding layers only being used at regions in the image containing boundaries between classes. In addition, given a trained model, our representation enables flexible inference schemes to trade-off accuracy and computational cost, allowing the network to adapt in constrained situations such as embedded devices. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on the Cityscapes, SUN-RGBD and ADE20k datasets. On Cityscapes, we obtain an relative 3% mIoU improvement compared to a dilated network with similar memory consumption; and only receive a 3% relative mIoU drop compared to a large dilated network, while reducing memory consumption by over 4$\times$.Comment: Accepted for IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 202

Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning

The release of nuPlan marks a new era in vehicle motion planning research, offering the first large-scale real-world dataset and evaluation schemes requiring both precise short-term planning and long-horizon ego-forecasting. Existing systems struggle to simultaneously meet both requirements. Indeed, we find that these tasks are fundamentally misaligned and should be addressed independently. We further assess the current state of closed-loop planning in the field, revealing the limitations of learning-based methods in complex real-world scenarios and the value of simple rule-based priors such as centerline selection through lane graph search algorithms. More surprisingly, for the open-loop sub-task, we observe that the best results are achieved when using only this centerline as scene context (i.e., ignoring all information regarding the map and other agents). Combining these insights, we propose an extremely simple and efficient planner which outperforms an extensive set of competitors, winning the nuPlan planning challenge 2023.Comment: CoRL 202

End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers

The autonomous driving community has witnessed a rapid growth in approaches that embrace an end-to-end algorithm framework, utilizing raw sensor input to generate vehicle motion plans, instead of concentrating on individual tasks such as detection and motion prediction. End-to-end systems, in comparison to modular pipelines, benefit from joint feature optimization for perception and planning. This field has flourished due to the availability of large-scale datasets, closed-loop evaluation, and the increasing need for autonomous driving algorithms to perform effectively in challenging scenarios. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive analysis of more than 250 papers, covering the motivation, roadmap, methodology, challenges, and future trends in end-to-end autonomous driving. We delve into several critical challenges, including multi-modality, interpretability, causal confusion, robustness, and world models, amongst others. Additionally, we discuss current advancements in foundation models and visual pre-training, as well as how to incorporate these techniques within the end-to-end driving framework. To facilitate future research, we maintain an active repository that contains up-to-date links to relevant literature and open-source projects at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/End-to-end-Autonomous-Driving