# ActiveAD: Planning-Oriented Active Learning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02877 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02877/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 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 51 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2024.

## 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 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [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)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [BatchBALD: Efficient and Diverse Batch Acquisition for Deep Bayesian Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08158/) (2019)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [Learning Loss for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03677/) (2019)
- [Variational Adversarial Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00370/) (2019)
- [Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13508/) (2022)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14024/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08265/) (2021)
- [Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06242/) (2023)
- [A Language Agent for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10813/) (2023)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24044/) (2025)
- [A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11260/) (2025)
- [Raw2Drive: Reinforcement Learning with Aligned World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (in CARLA v2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16394/) (2025)
- [ReSim: Reliable World Simulation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09981/) (2025)
- [Reinforced Refinement with Self-Aware Expansion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09800/) (2025)
- [DSDrive: Distilling Large Language Model for Lightweight End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Unified Reasoning and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05360/) (2025)
- [Bench2Drive-R: Turning Real World Data into Reactive Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving Benchmark by Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09647/) (2024)
- [FlatFusion: Delving into Details of Sparse Transformer-based Camera-LiDAR Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06832/) (2024)
- [Safety Implications of Explainable Artificial Intelligence in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12176/) (2024)
- [Perception Without Vision for Trajectory Prediction: Ego Vehicle Dynamics as Scene Representation for Efficient Active Learning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09049/) (2024)
- [LAP: Fast LAtent Diffusion Planner for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00470/) (2025)
- [CAPS: Context-Aware Priority Sampling for Enhanced Imitation Learning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01650/) (2025)
- [Active Learning from Scene Embeddings for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11062/) (2025)
- [Efficient Active Training for Deep LiDAR Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03211/) (2025)
- [Gradient-Based Data Valuation Improves Curriculum Learning for Game-Theoretic Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00388/) (2026)
- [VeriDrive: Verifiable Counterfactual Supervision for Cost-Efficient Vision-Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07338/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end differentiable learning for autonomous driving (AD) has recently become a prominent paradigm. One main bottleneck lies in its voracious appetite for high-quality labeled data e.g. 3D bounding boxes and semantic segmentation, which are notoriously expensive to manually annotate. The difficulty is further pronounced due to the prominent fact that the behaviors within samples in AD often suffer from long tailed distribution. In other words, a large part of collected data can be trivial (e.g. simply driving forward in a straight road) and only a few cases are safety-critical. In this paper, we explore a practically important yet under-explored problem about how to achieve sample and label efficiency for end-to-end AD. Specifically, we design a planning-oriented active learning method which progressively annotates part of collected raw data according to the proposed diversity and usefulness criteria for planning routes. Empirically, we show that our planning-oriented approach could outperform general active learning methods by a large margin. Notably, our method achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art end-to-end AD methods - by using only 30% nuScenes data. We hope our work could inspire future works to explore end-to-end AD from a data-centric perspective in addition to methodology efforts.