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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18341 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18341/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for autonomous driving, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 38 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-autonomous-driving/)
- 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 38)

- [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)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Tri-Perspective View for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07817/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [Exploring Object-Centric Temporal Modeling for Efficient Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11926/) (2023)
- [MapTR: Structured Modeling and Learning for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14437/) (2022)
- [HDMapNet: An Online HD Map Construction and Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06307/) (2021)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08920/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06679/) (2021)
- [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)
- [OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16038/) (2023)
- [GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11502/) (2024)
- [Scene as Occupancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02851/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08481/) (2024)
- [Sparse4D: Multi-view 3D Object Detection with Sparse Spatial-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10581/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16732/) (2025)
- [3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07996/) (2025)
- [A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11260/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16760/) (2025)
- [DriveX: Omni Scene Modeling for Learning Generalizable World Knowledge in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19239/) (2025)
- [PRIX: Learning to Plan from Raw Pixels for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17596/) (2025)
- [ReAL-AD: Towards Human-Like Reasoning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12499/) (2025)
- [ResWorld: Temporal Residual World Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10884/) (2026)
- [DynVLA: Learning World Dynamics for Action Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11041/) (2026)
- [RoCA: Robust Cross-Domain End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10145/) (2025)
- [TrajDiff: End-to-end Autonomous Driving without Perception Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00723/) (2025)
- [SafeDrive: Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning for End-to-End Driving in a Sparse World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18887/) (2026)
- [VR-Drive: Viewpoint-Robust End-to-End Driving with Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23205/) (2025)
- [HENet++: Hybrid Encoding and Multi-task Learning for 3D Perception and End-to-end Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07106/) (2025)
- [GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16274/) (2026)
- [KnowVal: A Knowledge-Augmented and Value-Guided Autonomous Driving System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20299/) (2025)
- [FlowDrive: Energy Flow Field for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14303/) (2025)
- [WPT: World-to-Policy Transfer via Online World Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20095/) (2025)
- [FlowAD: Ego-Scene Interactive Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13399/) (2026)
- [Echo Planning for Autonomous Driving: From Current Observations to Future Trajectories and Back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18945/) (2025)
- [Vision-Centric 4D Occupancy Forecasting and Planning via Implicit Residual World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16729/) (2025)
- [Restore Text First, Enhance Image Later: Two-Stage Scene Text Image Super-Resolution with Glyph Structure Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21590/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11417/) (2026)
- [Embodied Cognition Augmented End2End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01334/) (2025)
- [LAP: Fast LAtent Diffusion Planner for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00470/) (2025)
- [UniUncer: Unified Dynamic Static Uncertainty for End to End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07686/) (2026)
- [DynFlowDrive: Flow-Based Dynamic World Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19675/) (2026)
- [DLWM: Dual Latent World Models enable Holistic Gaussian-centric Pre-training in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00969/) (2026)
- [HEAT: Heterogeneous End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Trajectory-Guided World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19631/) (2026)
- [IDOL: Inverse-Dynamics-Guided Future Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31476/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2EAD) methods typically rely on supervised perception tasks to extract explicit scene information (e.g., objects, maps). This reliance necessitates expensive annotations and constrains deployment and data scalability in real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce SSR, a novel framework that utilizes only 16 navigation-guided tokens as Sparse Scene Representation, efficiently extracting crucial scene information for E2EAD. Our method eliminates the need for human-designed supervised sub-tasks, allowing computational resources to concentrate on essential elements directly related to navigation intent. We further introduce a temporal enhancement module, aligning predicted future scenes with actual future scenes through self-supervision. SSR achieves a 27.2% relative reduction in L2 error and a 51.6% decrease in collision rate to UniAD in nuScenes, with a 10.9× faster inference speed and 13× faster training time. Moreover, SSR outperforms VAD-Base with a 48.6-point improvement on driving score in CARLA's Town05 Long benchmark. This framework represents a significant leap in real-time autonomous driving systems and paves the way for future scalable deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/PeidongLi/SSR.