Navigation-Guided Sparse Scene Representation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

March 23, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Original title: Dose End-to-End Autonomous Driving Really Need Perception Tasks?

Peidong Li, Dixiao Cui

Zhijia Technology, Suzhou, China

arXiv

News

  • 2025.03.23 Code and checkpoint released. ๐Ÿš€
  • 2025.02.01 Chinese Blog of SSR available in zhihu.
  • 2025.01.23 SSR is accepted to ICLR 2025. ๐ŸŽ‰
  • 2024.09.30 Paper of SSR available in arxiv.

Introduction

We introduce SSR, a novel framework that leverages navigation-guided Sparse Scene Representation, achieving state-of-the-art performance with minimal costs. Inspired by how human drivers selectively focus on scene elements based on navigation cues, we find that only a minimal set of tokens from dense BEV features is necessary for effective scene representation in autonomous driving.


Overview

SSR consists of two parts: the purple part, which is used during both training and inference, and the gray part, which is only used during training. In the purple part, the dense BEV feature is first compressed by the Scenes TokenLearner into sparse queries, which are then used for planning via cross-attention. In the gray part, the predicted BEV feature is obtained from the BEV world model. The future BEV feature is then used to supervise the predicted BEV feature, enhancing both the scene representation and the planning decoder.


Prepare

Train and Test

Train SSR with 8 GPUs

cd /path/to/SSR
conda activate ssr
python -m torch.distributed.run --nproc_per_node=8 --master_port=2333 tools/train.py projects/configs/SSR/SSR_e2e.py --launcher pytorch --deterministic --work-dir path/to/save/outputs

Eval SSR with 1 GPU

cd /path/to/SSR
conda activate ssr
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python tools/test.py projects/configs/SSR/SSR_e2e.py /path/to/ckpt.pth --launcher none --eval bbox --tmpdir tmp

Results

*After refactoring, the released checkpoint exhibits minor difference with results reported in the paper.

Log and Checkpoint : Google Drive

UniAD-style metric protocal

MethodL2MAX (m) 1sL2MAX (m) 2sL2MAX (m) 3sL2MAX (m) Avg.CRMAX (%) 1sCRMAX (%) 2sCRMAX (%) 3sCRMAX (%) Avg.
SSR0.250.641.330.740.000.080.430.17

VAD-style metric protocal

MethodL2AVG (m) 1sL2AVG (m) 2sL2AVG (m) 3sL2AVG (m) Avg.CRAVG (%) 1sCRAVG (%) 2sCRAVG (%) 3sCRAVG (%) Avg.
SSR0.190.360.620.390.020.030.130.06

Visualization

We visualize the results of our framework on the nuScenes dataset and Carla Town05 Long benchmark.

nuScenes


Carla

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5cf7825c-5c8e-442e-85d3-894f4095f6d6

Citation

If this work is helpful for your research, please consider citing the following BibTeX entry.

@inproceedings{li2025navigationguidedsparsescenerepresentation,
  title={Navigation-Guided Sparse Scene Representation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving},
  author={Peidong Li and Dixiao Cui},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year={2025}
}

License

All code in this repository is under the Apache License 2.0.

Acknowledgement

SSR is based on the following projects: VAD, GenAD, BEV-Planner and TokenLearner. Many thanks for their excellent contributions to the community.