# Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 377 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 52 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2021.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [End-to-end system architecture](https://mlsanity.com/driving/end-to-end-system-architecture/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [Virtual Worlds as Proxy for Multi-Object Tracking Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06457/) (2016)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [SoPhie: An Attentive GAN for Predicting Paths Compliant to Social and Physical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01482/) (2018)
- [Deep Continuous Fusion for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10992/) (2020)
- [Social-BiGAT: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting using Bicycle-GAN and Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03395/) (2019)
- [Fast and Furious: Real Time End-to-End 3D Detection, Tracking and Motion Forecasting with a Single Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12395/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12397/) (2020)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR++: Accurate Depth for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06310/) (2019)
- [PRECOG: PREdiction Conditioned On Goals in Visual Multi-Agent Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01296/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [IntentNet: Learning to Predict Intention from Raw Sensor Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07907/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Model-Free Reinforcement Learning for Urban Driving using Implicit Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10868/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Learning of Driving Models from Large-scale Video Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01079/) (2016)
- [PnPNet: End-to-End Perception and Prediction with Tracking in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14711/) (2020)
- [Can Autonomous Vehicles Identify, Recover From, and Adapt to Distribution Shifts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14911/) (2020)
- [ImageBERT: Cross-modal Pre-training with Large-scale Weak-supervised Image-Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07966/) (2020)
- [LaserNet: An Efficient Probabilistic 3D Object Detector for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08701/) (2019)
- [Multimodal End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03199/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 377)

- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11810/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07488/) (2023)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [Is Ego Status All You Need for Open-Loop End-to-End Autonomous Driving?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03031/) (2023)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23262/) (2024)
- [Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14024/) (2022)
- [ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19755/) (2025)
- [NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04456/) (2021)
- [Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06242/) (2023)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08481/) (2024)
- [Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22313/) (2024)
- [V2V4Real: A Real-world Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07601/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01941/) (2025)
- [Model-Based Imitation Learning for Urban Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07729/) (2022)
- [DriveAdapter: Breaking the Coupling Barrier of Perception and Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00398/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How should representations from complementary sensors be integrated for autonomous driving? Geometry-based sensor fusion has shown great promise for perception tasks such as object detection and motion forecasting. However, for the actual driving task, the global context of the 3D scene is key, e.g. a change in traffic light state can affect the behavior of a vehicle geometrically distant from that traffic light. Geometry alone may therefore be insufficient for effectively fusing representations in end-to-end driving models. In this work, we demonstrate that imitation learning policies based on existing sensor fusion methods under-perform in the presence of a high density of dynamic agents and complex scenarios, which require global contextual reasoning, such as handling traffic oncoming from multiple directions at uncontrolled intersections. Therefore, we propose TransFuser, a novel Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer, to integrate image and LiDAR representations using attention. We experimentally validate the efficacy of our approach in urban settings involving complex scenarios using the CARLA urban driving simulator. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art driving performance while reducing collisions by 76% compared to geometry-based fusion.