NaviHydra: Controllable Navigation-guided End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Hydra-distillation

The complexity of autonomous driving scenarios requires robust models that can interpret high-level navigation commands and generate safe trajectories. While traditional rule-based systems can react to these commands, they often struggle in dynamic environments, and end-to-end methods face challenges in complying with explicit navigation commands. To address this, we present NaviHydra, a controllable navigation-guided end-to-end model distilled from an existing rule-based simulator. Our framework accepts high-level navigation commands as control signals, generating trajectories that align with specified intentions. We utilize a Bird's Eye View (BEV) based trajectory gathering method to enhance the trajectory feature extraction. Additionally, we introduce a novel navigation compliance metric to evaluate adherence to intended route, improving controllability and navigation safety. To comprehensively assess our model's controllability, we design a test that evaluates its response to various navigation commands. Our method significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving state-of-the-art results in the NAVSIM benchmark, demonstrating its effectiveness in advancing autonomous driving.

FlowDrive: moderated flow matching with data balancing for trajectory planning

Learning-based planners are sensitive to the long-tailed distribution of driving data. Common maneuvers dominate datasets, while dangerous or rare scenarios are sparse. This imbalance can bias models toward the frequent cases and degrade performance on critical scenarios. To tackle this problem, we compare balancing strategies for sampling training data and find reweighting by trajectory pattern an effective approach. We then present FlowDrive, a flow-matching trajectory planner that learns a conditional rectified flow to map noise directly to trajectory distributions with few flow-matching steps. We further introduce moderated, in-the-loop guidance that injects small perturbation between flow steps to systematically increase trajectory diversity while remaining scene-consistent. On nuPlan and the interaction-focused interPlan benchmarks, FlowDrive achieves state-of-the-art results among learning-based planners and approaches methods with rule-based refinements. After adding moderated guidance and light post-processing (FlowDrive*), it achieves overall state-of-the-art performance across nearly all benchmark splits.

Vision-based Lifting of 2D Object Detections for Automated Driving

Image-based 3D object detection is an inevitable part of autonomous driving because cheap onboard cameras are already available in most modern cars. Because of the accurate depth information, currently, most state-of-the-art 3D object detectors heavily rely on LiDAR data. In this paper, we propose a pipeline which lifts the results of existing vision-based 2D algorithms to 3D detections using only cameras as a cost-effective alternative to LiDAR. In contrast to existing approaches, we focus not only on cars but on all types of road users. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first using a 2D CNN to process the point cloud for each 2D detection to keep the computational effort as low as possible. Our evaluation on the challenging KITTI 3D object detection benchmark shows results comparable to state-of-the-art image-based approaches while having a runtime of only a third.

SDTagNet: Leveraging Text-Annotated Navigation Maps for Online HD Map Construction

Autonomous vehicles rely on detailed and accurate environmental information to operate safely. High definition (HD) maps offer a promising solution, but their high maintenance cost poses a significant barrier to scalable deployment. This challenge is addressed by online HD map construction methods, which generate local HD maps from live sensor data. However, these methods are inherently limited by the short perception range of onboard sensors. To overcome this limitation and improve general performance, recent approaches have explored the use of standard definition (SD) maps as prior, which are significantly easier to maintain. We propose SDTagNet, the first online HD map construction method that fully utilizes the information of widely available SD maps, like OpenStreetMap, to enhance far range detection accuracy. Our approach introduces two key innovations. First, in contrast to previous work, we incorporate not only polyline SD map data with manually selected classes, but additional semantic information in the form of textual annotations. In this way, we enrich SD vector map tokens with NLP-derived features, eliminating the dependency on predefined specifications or exhaustive class taxonomies. Second, we introduce a point-level SD map encoder together with orthogonal element identifiers to uniformly integrate all types of map elements. Experiments on Argoverse 2 and nuScenes show that this boosts map perception performance by up to +5.9 mAP (+45%) w.r.t. map construction without priors and up to +3.2 mAP (+20%) w.r.t. previous approaches that already use SD map priors. Code is available at https://github.com/immel-f/SDTagNet

RetroMotion: Retrocausal Motion Forecasting Models are Instructable

Motion forecasts of road users (i.e., agents) vary in complexity as a function of scene constraints and interactive behavior. We address this with a multi-task learning method for motion forecasting that includes a retrocausal flow of information. The corresponding tasks are to forecast (1) marginal trajectory distributions for all modeled agents and (2) joint trajectory distributions for interacting agents. Using a transformer model, we generate the joint distributions by re-encoding marginal distributions followed by pairwise modeling. This incorporates a retrocausal flow of information from later points in marginal trajectories to earlier points in joint trajectories. Per trajectory point, we model positional uncertainty using compressed exponential power distributions. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the Waymo Interaction Prediction dataset and generalizes well to the Argoverse 2 dataset. Additionally, our method provides an interface for issuing instructions through trajectory modifications. Our experiments show that regular training of motion forecasting leads to the ability to follow goal-based instructions and to adapt basic directional instructions to the scene context. Code: https://github.com/kit-mrt/future-motion

Divide and Merge: Motion and Semantic Learning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Perceiving the environment and its changes over time corresponds to two fundamental yet heterogeneous types of information: semantics and motion. Previous end-to-end autonomous driving works represent both types of information in a single feature vector. However, including motion tasks, such as prediction and planning, always impairs detection and tracking performance, a phenomenon known as negative transfer in multi-task learning. To address this issue, we propose Neural-Bayes motion decoding, a novel parallel detection, tracking, and prediction method separating semantic and motion learning, similar to the Bayes filter. Specifically, we employ a set of learned motion queries that operate in parallel with the detection and tracking queries, sharing a unified set of recursively updated reference points. Moreover, we employ interactive semantic decoding to enhance information exchange in semantic tasks, promoting positive transfer. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show improvements of 5% in detection and 11% in tracking. Our method achieves state-of-the-art collision rates in open-loop planning evaluation without any modifications to the planning module.

Conditional Prediction by Simulation for Automated Driving

Modular automated driving systems commonly handle prediction and planning as sequential, separate tasks, thereby prohibiting cooperative maneuvers. To enable cooperative planning, this work introduces a prediction model that models the conditional dependencies between trajectories. For this, predictions are generated by a microscopic traffic simulation, with the individual traffic participants being controlled by a realistic behavior model trained via Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning. By assuming various candidate trajectories for the automated vehicle, we generate predictions conditioned on each of them. Furthermore, our approach allows the candidate trajectories to adapt dynamically during the prediction rollout. Several example scenarios are available at https://conditionalpredictionbysimulation.github.io/.

M3TR: Generalist HD Map Construction with Variable Map Priors

Autonomous vehicles require road information for their operation, usually in form of HD maps. Since offline maps eventually become outdated or may only be partially available, online HD map construction methods have been proposed to infer map information from live sensor data. A key issue remains how to exploit such partial or outdated map information as a prior. We introduce M3TR (Multi-Masking Map Transformer), a generalist approach for HD map construction both with and without map priors. We address shortcomings in ground truth generation for Argoverse 2 and nuScenes and propose the first realistic scenarios with semantically diverse map priors. Examining various query designs, we use an improved method for integrating prior map elements into a HD map construction model, increasing performance by +4.3 mAP. Finally, we show that training across all prior scenarios yields a single Generalist model, whose performance is on par with previous Expert models that can handle only one specific type of map prior. M3TR thus is the first model capable of leveraging variable map priors, making it suitable for real-world deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/immel-f/m3tr

SceneMotion: From Agent-Centric Embeddings to Scene-Wide Forecasts

Self-driving vehicles rely on multimodal motion forecasts to effectively interact with their environment and plan safe maneuvers. We introduce SceneMotion, an attention-based model for forecasting scene-wide motion modes of multiple traffic agents. Our model transforms local agent-centric embeddings into scene-wide forecasts using a novel latent context module. This module learns a scene-wide latent space from multiple agent-centric embeddings, enabling joint forecasting and interaction modeling. The competitive performance in the Waymo Open Interaction Prediction Challenge demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we cluster future waypoints in time and space to quantify the interaction between agents. We merge all modes and analyze each mode independently to determine which clusters are resolved through interaction or result in conflict. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/kit-mrt/future-motion

Generation of Training Data from HD Maps in the Lanelet2 Framework

Using HD maps directly as training data for machine learning tasks has seen a massive surge in popularity and shown promising results, e.g. in the field of map perception. Despite that, a standardized HD map framework supporting all parts of map-based automated driving and training label generation from map data does not exist. Furthermore, feeding map perception models with map data as part of the input during real-time inference is not addressed by the research community. In order to fill this gap, we presentlanelet2_ml_converter, an integrated extension to the HD map framework Lanelet2, widely used in automated driving systems by academia and industry. With this addition Lanelet2 unifies map based automated driving, machine learning inference and training, all from a single source of map data and format. Requirements for a unified framework are analyzed and the implementation of these requirements is described. The usability of labels in state of the art machine learning is demonstrated with application examples from the field of map perception. The source code is available embedded in the Lanelet2 framework under https://github.com/fzi-forschungszentrum-informatik/Lanelet2/tree/feature_ml_converter