Decoupling Scene Perception and Ego Status: A Multi-Context Fusion Approach for Enhanced Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving
This addresses a key bottleneck in autonomous driving for improved generalization, though it is an incremental architectural improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of over-reliance on ego status in end-to-end autonomous driving systems, which hinders generalization, by proposing AdaptiveAD, a multi-context fusion approach that decouples scene perception and ego status; it achieves state-of-the-art open-loop planning performance on the nuScenes dataset.
Modular design of planning-oriented autonomous driving has markedly advanced end-to-end systems. However, existing architectures remain constrained by an over-reliance on ego status, hindering generalization and robust scene understanding. We identify the root cause as an inherent design within these architectures that allows ego status to be easily leveraged as a shortcut. Specifically, the premature fusion of ego status in the upstream BEV encoder allows an information flow from this strong prior to dominate the downstream planning module. To address this challenge, we propose AdaptiveAD, an architectural-level solution based on a multi-context fusion strategy. Its core is a dual-branch structure that explicitly decouples scene perception and ego status. One branch performs scene-driven reasoning based on multi-task learning, but with ego status deliberately omitted from the BEV encoder, while the other conducts ego-driven reasoning based solely on the planning task. A scene-aware fusion module then adaptively integrates the complementary decisions from the two branches to form the final planning trajectory. To ensure this decoupling does not compromise multi-task learning, we introduce a path attention mechanism for ego-BEV interaction and add two targeted auxiliary tasks: BEV unidirectional distillation and autoregressive online mapping. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that AdaptiveAD achieves state-of-the-art open-loop planning performance. Crucially, it significantly mitigates the over-reliance on ego status and exhibits impressive generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios.