DiffE2E: Rethinking End-to-End Driving with a Hybrid Action Diffusion and Supervised Policy
On the map: End-to-end autonomous driving → End-to-end system architecture
Abstract (arXiv)
End-to-end learning has emerged as a transformative paradigm in autonomous driving. However, the inherently multimodal nature of driving behaviors and the generalization challenges in long-tail scenarios remain critical obstacles to robust deployment. We propose DiffE2E, a diffusion-based end-to-end autonomous driving framework. This framework first performs multi-scale alignment of multi-sensor perception features through a hierarchical bidirectional cross-attention mechanism. It then introduces a novel class of hybrid diffusion-supervision decoders based on the Transformer architecture, and adopts a collaborative training paradigm that seamlessly integrates the strengths of both diffusion and supervised policy. DiffE2E models structured latent spaces, where diffusion captures the distribution of future trajectories and supervision enhances controllability and robustness. A global condition integration module enables deep fusion of perception features with high-level targets, significantly improving the quality of trajectory generation. Subsequently, a cross-attention mechanism facilitates efficient interaction between integrated features and hybrid latent variables, promoting the joint optimization of diffusion and supervision objectives for structured output generation, ultimately leading to more robust control. Experiments demonstrate that DiffE2E achieves state-of-the-art performance in both CARLA closed-loop evaluations and NAVSIM benchmarks. The proposed integrated diffusion-supervision policy offers a generalizable paradigm for hybrid action representation, with strong potential for extension to broader domains including embodied intelligence. More details and visualizations are available at hrefhttps://infinidrive.github.io/DiffE2E/project website.
Key facts. Cited by 9 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 58 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.
Builds on
58 of 60 references.
Closest ancestors · 16
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillation17 Mar
- 2024Hidden Biases of End-to-End Driving Datasets12 Dec
- 2024DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mamba7 Aug
- 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking21 Jun
- 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model12 Jun
- 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation30 May
- 2023DriveAdapter: Breaking the Coupling Barrier of Perception and Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving1 Aug
- 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers29 Jun
- 2023Hidden Biases of End-to-End Driving Models13 Jun
- 2023Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenes17 May
- 2023Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Driving10 May
- 2022ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning15 Jul
4 more
- 2022Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline16 Jun
- 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving31 May
- 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles22 Jun
- 2021Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving19 Apr
Other references · 42
- 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
- 2019EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 6,442
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
- 2022Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Modelscited by 3,045
- 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,838
- 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,449
- 2022DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Stepscited by 1,979
- 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,822
30 more
- 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
- 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,061
- 2021Scaling Vision Transformerscited by 999
- 2020Designing Network Design Spacescited by 960
- 2022On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 725
- 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
- 2024One Step Diffusion via Shortcut Modelscited by 391
- 2019Learning by Cheatingcited by 383
- 2019Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 346
- 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 334
- 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 289
- 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 249
- 2023DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Drivingcited by 233
- 2023MotionDiffuser: Controllable Multi-Agent Motion Prediction using Diffusioncited by 213
- 2022Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformercited by 212
- 2021End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coachcited by 194
- 2021NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 174
- 2019An Energy and GPU-Computation Efficient Backbone Network for Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 163
- 2023MotionLM: Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting as Language Modelingcited by 156
- 2022Model-Based Imitation Learning for Urban Drivingcited by 150
- 2025Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidancecited by 141
- 2022Learning from All Vehiclescited by 135
- 2020A Survey of End-to-End Driving: Architectures and Training Methodscited by 123
- 2025GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 120
- 2021Learning to drive from a world on railscited by 114
- 2022PlanT: Explainable Planning Transformers via Object-Level Representationscited by 105
- 2023ReasonNet: End-to-End Driving with Temporal and Global Reasoningcited by 93
- 2024Diffusion-ES: Gradient-free Planning with Diffusion for Autonomous Driving and Zero-Shot Instruction Followingcited by 42
- 2024Versatile Behavior Diffusion for Generalized Traffic Agent Simulationcited by 30
- 2024ComDrive: Comfort-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 11
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 3.
9 papers.
- 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 72
- 2025OmniNWM: Omniscient Driving Navigation World Modelscited by 33
- 2025PRIX: Learning to Plan from Raw Pixels for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 16
- 2025Percept-WAM: Perception-Enhanced World-Awareness-Action Model for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 9
- 2025TrajDiff: End-to-end Autonomous Driving without Perception Annotationcited by 8
- 2026ProDrive: Proactive Planning for Autonomous Driving via Ego-Environment Co-Evolutioncited by 4
- 2025DiffVL: Diffusion-Based Visual Localization on 2D Maps via BEV-Conditioned GPS Denoisingcited by 2
- 2026Diffusion Forcing Planner: History-Annealed Planning with Time-Dependent Guidance for Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
- 2026VIPS: Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Planning Benchmark via Pseudo-Simulationcited by 0
- 2026VIPS: Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Planning Benchmark via Pseudo-Simulation2 Sep 2026
- 2026Diffusion Forcing Planner: History-Annealed Planning with Time-Dependent Guidance for Autonomous Driving9 Jun 2026
- 2026ProDrive: Proactive Planning for Autonomous Driving via Ego-Environment Co-Evolution28 Apr 2026
- 2025TrajDiff: End-to-end Autonomous Driving without Perception Annotation30 Nov 2025
- 2025Percept-WAM: Perception-Enhanced World-Awareness-Action Model for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving24 Nov 2025
- 2025OmniNWM: Omniscient Driving Navigation World Models21 Oct 2025
- 2025DiffVL: Diffusion-Based Visual Localization on 2D Maps via BEV-Conditioned GPS Denoising18 Sep 2025
- 2025PRIX: Learning to Plan from Raw Pixels for End-to-End Autonomous Driving23 Jul 2025
- 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving30 Jun 2025
Similar, not cited
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- 2026Multimodal Action Diffusion for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- 2025DiffAD: A Unified Diffusion Modeling Approach for Autonomous Driving
- 2026A Survey on End-to-End Autonomous Driving Training from the Perspectives of Data, Strategy, and Platform
- 2026What Matters for Scalable and Robust Learning in End-to-End Driving Planners?
- 2026UniTeD: Unified Temporal Diffusion for Joint Perception and Planning in Autonomous Driving
- 2025Using Ensemble Diffusion to Estimate Uncertainty for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- 2026D3-MoE:Dual Disentangled Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts for Style-Controllable End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- 2026A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Preserving Policy Compatibility Under Perception Updates in End-to-End Autonomous Driving