# Rethinking Imitation-based Planner for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10443 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10443/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Imitation-learning end-to-end planners, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 44 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2023.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Imitation-learning end-to-end planners](https://mlsanity.com/driving/imitation-learning-end-to-end-planners/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06679/) (2021)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14024/) (2022)
- [NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04456/) (2021)
- [MARS: An Instance-aware, Modular and Realistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15058/) (2023)
- [Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06242/) (2023)
- [GameFormer: Game-theoretic Modeling and Learning of Transformer-based Interactive Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05760/) (2023)
- [Learning from All Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11934/) (2022)
- [Imitation Is Not Enough: Robustifying Imitation with Reinforcement Learning for Challenging Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11419/) (2022)
- [Urban Driver: Learning to Drive from Real-world Demonstrations Using Policy Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13333/) (2021)
- [PlanT: Explainable Planning Transformers via Object-Level Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14222/) (2022)
- [VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12083/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Integrated Motion Prediction and Planning with Learnable Cost Function for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10422/) (2022)
- [Forecast-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training for Motion Forecasting with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09882/) (2023)
- [Fighting Copycat Agents in Behavioral Cloning from Observation Histories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14876/) (2020)
- [SafetyNet: Safe planning for real-world self-driving vehicles using machine-learned policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13602/) (2021)
- [Symphony: Learning Realistic and Diverse Agents for Autonomous Driving Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03195/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03601/) (2024)
- [PLUTO: Pushing the Limit of Imitation Learning-based Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14327/) (2024)
- [Can Vehicle Motion Planning Generalize to Realistic Long-tail Scenarios?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07569/) (2024)
- [PlanAgent: A Multi-modal Large Language Agent for Closed-loop Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01587/) (2024)
- [GaussianAD: Gaussian-Centric End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10371/) (2024)
- [SMART: Scalable Multi-agent Real-time Motion Generation via Next-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15677/) (2024)
- [Bench2Drive-R: Turning Real World Data into Reactive Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving Benchmark by Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09647/) (2024)
- [Instruct Large Language Models to Drive like Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07296/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Causality of End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06546/) (2024)
- [LiloDriver: A Lifelong Learning Framework for Closed-loop Motion Planning in Long-tail Autonomous Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17209/) (2025)
- [LoRD: Adapting Differentiable Driving Policies to Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09681/) (2024)
- [FlowDrive: moderated flow matching with data balancing for trajectory planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21961/) (2025)
- [HYPE: Hybrid Planning with Ego Proposal-Conditioned Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12733/) (2025)
- [DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06055/) (2026)
- [Safe and Stylized Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Driving via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04329/) (2026)
- [Utilizing Navigation Paths to Generate Target Points for Enhanced End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08349/) (2024)
- [LHPF: Look back the History and Plan for the Future in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17253/) (2024)
- [Physics-informed Diffusion Mamba Transformer for Real-world Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00808/) (2026)
- [Learning from Mistakes: Rollout-Retrieval Lifelong Policy Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30537/) (2026)
- [Align2Act: Instruction-Tuned Models for Human-Aligned Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10503/) (2025)
- [A Neuro-Symbolic Framework Combining Inductive and Deductive Reasoning for Autonomous Driving Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12421/) (2026)
- [Dash2Sim: Closed-Loop Driving Simulation from in-the-wild Dashcam Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07366/) (2026)
- [Shift & Drift: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Generalizable and Robust Autonomous Driving Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07844/) (2026)
- [Real-Time Rulebook-Aware Nonlinear MPC for Autonomous Driving with Priority-Biased Tiered Slacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10975/) (2026)
- [nuTruck: Benchmarking Autonomous Driving Planning for Distributed Electric-drive Trucks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13704/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, imitation-based driving planners have reported considerable success. However, due to the absence of a standardized benchmark, the effectiveness of various designs remains unclear. The newly released nuPlan addresses this issue by offering a large-scale real-world dataset and a standardized closed-loop benchmark for equitable comparisons. Utilizing this platform, we conduct a comprehensive study on two fundamental yet underexplored aspects of imitation-based planners: the essential features for ego planning and the effective data augmentation techniques to reduce compounding errors. Furthermore, we highlight an imitation gap that has been overlooked by current learning systems. Finally, integrating our findings, we propose a strong baseline model-PlanTF. Our results demonstrate that a well-designed, purely imitation-based planner can achieve highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods involving hand-crafted rules and exhibit superior generalization capabilities in long-tail cases. Our models and benchmarks are publicly available. Project website https://jchengai.github.io/planTF.