Future-Aware End-to-End Driving: Bidirectional Modeling of Trajectory Planning and Scene Evolution
This work addresses the limitation of one-shot decision-making in autonomous driving for improved safety and adaptability in complex scenarios, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of end-to-end autonomous driving by proposing SeerDrive, a framework that jointly models future scene evolution and trajectory planning in a closed-loop manner, achieving significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on NAVSIM and nuScenes benchmarks.
End-to-end autonomous driving methods aim to directly map raw sensor inputs to future driving actions such as planned trajectories, bypassing traditional modular pipelines. While these approaches have shown promise, they often operate under a one-shot paradigm that relies heavily on the current scene context, potentially underestimating the importance of scene dynamics and their temporal evolution. This limitation restricts the model's ability to make informed and adaptive decisions in complex driving scenarios. We propose a new perspective: the future trajectory of an autonomous vehicle is closely intertwined with the evolving dynamics of its environment, and conversely, the vehicle's own future states can influence how the surrounding scene unfolds. Motivated by this bidirectional relationship, we introduce SeerDrive, a novel end-to-end framework that jointly models future scene evolution and trajectory planning in a closed-loop manner. Our method first predicts future bird's-eye view (BEV) representations to anticipate the dynamics of the surrounding scene, then leverages this foresight to generate future-context-aware trajectories. Two key components enable this: (1) future-aware planning, which injects predicted BEV features into the trajectory planner, and (2) iterative scene modeling and vehicle planning, which refines both future scene prediction and trajectory generation through collaborative optimization. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM and nuScenes benchmarks show that SeerDrive significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.