# iPad: Iterative Proposal-centric End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15111 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15111/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 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 43 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2025.

## 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 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (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)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [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)
- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (2024)
- [Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17918/) (2023)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11979/) (2019)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06978/) (2024)
- [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)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24044/) (2025)
- [Driving on Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05083/) (2026)
- [RAP: 3D Rasterization Augmented End-to-End Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04333/) (2025)
- [SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23369/) (2025)
- [Drive-JEPA: Video JEPA Meets Multimodal Trajectory Distillation for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22032/) (2026)
- [SparseDriveV2: Scoring is All You Need for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29163/) (2026)
- [Reinforced Refinement with Self-Aware Expansion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09800/) (2025)
- [SpanVLA: Efficient Action Bridging and Learning from Negative-Recovery Samples for Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19710/) (2026)
- [PRIX: Learning to Plan from Raw Pixels for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17596/) (2025)
- [ResAD: Normalized Residual Trajectory Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08562/) (2025)
- [CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15120/) (2026)
- [RAD-2: Scaling Reinforcement Learning in a Generator-Discriminator Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15308/) (2026)
- [The DAWN of World-Action Interactive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11550/) (2026)
- [World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19836/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07170/) (2026)
- [KnowVal: A Knowledge-Augmented and Value-Guided Autonomous Driving System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20299/) (2025)
- [HiST-VLA: A Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13329/) (2026)
- [DA-WAM: Decision-Aligned Future Latents for Driving World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19085/) (2026)
- [WPT: World-to-Policy Transfer via Online World Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20095/) (2025)
- [ProDrive: Proactive Planning for Autonomous Driving via Ego-Environment Co-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25329/) (2026)
- [ChainFlow-VLA: Causal Flow Planning with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23270/) (2026)
- [Discrete-WAM: Unified Discrete Vision-Action Token Editing for World-Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05645/) (2026)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11417/) (2026)
- [DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06055/) (2026)
- [NTR: Neural Token Reconstruction for Scene Token Bottleneck in End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31116/) (2026)
- [IDOL: Inverse-Dynamics-Guided Future Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31476/) (2026)
- [CLEAR: Cognition and Latent Evaluation for Adaptive Routing in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06219/) (2026)
- [GeoWorldAD: Geometry World Action Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17521/) (2026)
- [AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01762/) (2026)
- [A Unified Candidate Set with Scene-Adaptive Refinement via Diffusion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03112/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving systems offer a promising alternative to traditional modular pipelines by reducing information loss and error accumulation, with significant potential to enhance both mobility and safety. However, most existing E2E approaches directly generate plans based on dense bird's-eye view (BEV) grid features, leading to inefficiency and limited planning awareness. To address these limitations, we propose iterative Proposal-centric autonomous driving (iPad), a novel framework that places proposals - a set of candidate future plans - at the center of feature extraction and auxiliary tasks. Central to iPad is ProFormer, a BEV encoder that iteratively refines proposals and their associated features through proposal-anchored attention, effectively fusing multi-view image data. Additionally, we introduce two lightweight, proposal-centric auxiliary tasks - mapping and prediction - that improve planning quality with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM and CARLA Bench2Drive benchmarks demonstrate that iPad achieves state-of-the-art performance while being significantly more efficient than prior leading methods.