Peidong Li

Peidong Li, Dixiao Cui

End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2EAD) methods typically rely on supervised perception tasks to extract explicit scene information (e.g., objects, maps). This reliance necessitates expensive annotations and constrains deployment and data scalability in real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce SSR, a novel framework that utilizes only 16 navigation-guided tokens as Sparse Scene Representation, efficiently extracting crucial scene information for E2EAD. Our method eliminates the need for human-designed supervised sub-tasks, allowing computational resources to concentrate on essential elements directly related to navigation intent. We further introduce a temporal enhancement module, aligning predicted future scenes with actual future scenes through self-supervision. SSR achieves a 27.2\% relative reduction in L2 error and a 51.6\% decrease in collision rate to UniAD in nuScenes, with a 10.9$\times$ faster inference speed and 13$\times$ faster training time. Moreover, SSR outperforms VAD-Base with a 48.6-point improvement on driving score in CARLA's Town05 Long benchmark. This framework represents a significant leap in real-time autonomous driving systems and paves the way for future scalable deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/PeidongLi/SSR.

Xiaoyu Li, Peidong Li, Xian Wu et al.

Spatio-temporal alignment is crucial for temporal modeling of end-to-end (E2E) perception in autonomous driving (AD), providing valuable structural and textural prior information. Existing methods typically rely on the attention mechanism to align objects across frames, simplifying the motion model with a unified explicit physical model (constant velocity, etc.). These approaches prefer semantic features for implicit alignment, challenging the importance of explicit motion modeling in the traditional perception paradigm. However, variations in motion states and object features across categories and frames render this alignment suboptimal. To address this, we propose HAT, a spatio-temporal alignment module that allows each object to adaptively decode the optimal alignment proposal from multiple hypotheses without direct supervision. Specifically, HAT first utilizes multiple explicit motion models to generate spatial anchors and motion-aware feature proposals for historical instances. It then performs multi-hypothesis decoding by incorporating semantic and motion cues embedded in cached object queries, ultimately providing the optimal alignment proposal for the target frame. On nuScenes, HAT consistently improves 3D temporal detectors and trackers across diverse baselines. It achieves state-of-the-art tracking results with 46.0% AMOTA on the test set when paired with the DETR3D detector. In an object-centric E2E AD method, HAT enhances perception accuracy (+1.3% mAP, +3.1% AMOTA) and reduces the collision rate by 32%. When semantics are corrupted (nuScenes-C), the enhancement of motion modeling by HAT enables more robust perception and planning in the E2E AD.