Title: VADv2: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Autonomous Driving, End-to-end, Probabilistic Planning, Closed-Loop, Planning Vocabulary

Abstract: Learning a human-like driving policy from large-scale driving demonstrations is promising, but the uncertainty and non-deterministic nature of planning make it challenging. Existing learning-based planning methods follow a deterministic paradigm to directly regress the action, failing to cope with the uncertainty problem. In this work, we propose a probabilistic planning model for end-to-end autonomous driving, termed VADv2. We resort to a probabilistic field function to model the mapping from the action space to the probabilistic distribution. Since the planning action space is a high-dimensional continuous spatiotemporal space and hard to tackle, we first discretize the planning action space to a large planning vocabulary and then tokenize the planning vocabulary into planning tokens. Planning tokens interact with scene tokens and output the probabilistic distribution of action. Mass driving demonstrations are leveraged to supervise the distribution. VADv2 achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop performance on the CARLA Town05 benchmark, significantly outperforming all existing methods. We also provide comprehensive evaluations on the NAVSIM dataset and a large-scale 3DGS-based benchmark, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications. Code will be released to facilitate future research.