README.md

January 31, 2026 · View on GitHub

VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving

Bo Jiang¹*, Shaoyu Chen¹*, Qing Xu², Bencheng Liao¹, Jiajie Chen², Helong Zhou², Qian Zhang², Wenyu Liu¹, Chang Huang², Xinggang Wang^1,†

¹ Huazhong University of Science and Technology, ² Horizon Robotics

*: equal contribution, ^†: corresponding author.

arXiv Paper, ICCV 2023

News

31 Jan, 2026: VADv2 is accepted by ICLR 2026 🎉 !
28 Sep, 2025: RAD is accepted by NeurIPS 2025. Core code for RL training is released at RAD.
27 Feb, 2025: Check out our latest work, DiffusionDrive, accepted by CVPR 2025! This study explores multi-modal end-to-end driving using diffusion models for real-time and real-world applications.
19 Feb, 2025: Checkout our new work RAD 🥰, end-to-end autonomous driving with large-scale 3DGS-based Reinforcement Learning post-training.
30 Oct, 2024: Checkout our new work Senna 🥰, which combines VAD/VADv2 with large vision-language models to achieve more accurate, robust, and generalizable autonomous driving planning.
20 Sep, 2024: Core code of VADv2 (config and model) is available in the VADv2 folder. Easy to integrade it into the VADv1 framework for training and inference.
17 June, 2024: CARLA implementation of VADv1 is available on Bench2Drive.
20 Feb, 2024: VADv2 is available on arXiv paper project page.
1 Aug, 2023: Code & models are released!
14 July, 2023: VAD is accepted by ICCV 2023🎉! Code and models will be open source soon!
21 Mar, 2023: We release the VAD paper on arXiv. Code/Models are coming soon. Please stay tuned! ☕️

Introduction

VAD is a vectorized paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving.

We propose VAD, an end-to-end unified vectorized paradigm for autonomous driving. VAD models the driving scene as a fully vectorized representation, getting rid of computationally intensive dense rasterized representation and hand-designed post-processing steps.
VAD implicitly and explicitly utilizes the vectorized scene information to improve planning safety, via query interaction and vectorized planning constraints.
VAD achieves SOTA end-to-end planning performance, outperforming previous methods by a large margin. Not only that, because of the vectorized scene representation and our concise model design, VAD greatly improves the inference speed, which is critical for the real-world deployment of an autonomous driving system.

Models

Method	Backbone	avg. L2	avg. Col.	FPS	Config	Download
VAD-Tiny	R50	0.78	0.38	16.8	config	model
VAD-Base	R50	0.72	0.22	4.5	config	model

Results

Open-loop planning results on nuScenes. See the paper for more details.

Method	L2 (m) 1s	L2 (m) 2s	L2 (m) 3s	Col. (%) 1s	Col. (%) 2s	Col. (%) 3s	FPS
ST-P3	1.33	2.11	2.90	0.23	0.62	1.27	1.6
UniAD	0.48	0.96	1.65	0.05	0.17	0.71	1.8
VAD-Tiny	0.46	0.76	1.12	0.21	0.35	0.58	16.8
VAD-Base	0.41	0.70	1.05	0.07	0.17	0.41	4.5

Closed-loop simulation results on CARLA.

Method	Town05 Short DS	Town05 Short RC	Town05 Long DS	Town05 Long RC
CILRS	7.47	13.40	3.68	7.19
LBC	30.97	55.01	7.05	32.09
Transfuser*	54.52	78.41	33.15	56.36
ST-P3	55.14	86.74	11.45	83.15
VAD-Base	64.29	87.26	30.31	75.20

*: LiDAR-based method.

Getting Started

Catalog

Code & Checkpoints Release
Initialization

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions about this repo, please feel free to contact us (bjiang@hust.edu.cn, outsidercsy@gmail.com).

Citation

If you find VAD useful in your research or applications, please consider giving us a star 🌟 and citing it by the following BibTeX entry.

@article{jiang2023vad,
  title={VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving},
  author={Jiang, Bo and Chen, Shaoyu and Xu, Qing and Liao, Bencheng and Chen, Jiajie and Zhou, Helong and Zhang, Qian and Liu, Wenyu and Huang, Chang and Wang, Xinggang},
  journal={ICCV},
  year={2023}
}

@article{chen2024vadv2,
  title={Vadv2: End-to-end vectorized autonomous driving via probabilistic planning},
  author={Chen, Shaoyu and Jiang, Bo and Gao, Hao and Liao, Bencheng and Xu, Qing and Zhang, Qian and Huang, Chang and Liu, Wenyu and Wang, Xinggang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.13243},
  year={2024}
}

License

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

Acknowledgement

VAD is based on the following projects: mmdet3d, detr3d, BEVFormer and MapTR. Many thanks for their excellent contributions to the community.