# Generalized Trajectory Scoring for End-to-end Multimodal Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (2024)
- [Exploring Object-Centric Temporal Modeling for Efficient Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11926/) (2023)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [Is Pseudo-Lidar needed for Monocular 3D Object detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06417/) (2021)
- [Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06978/) (2024)
- [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)
- [An Energy and GPU-Computation Efficient Backbone Network for Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09730/) (2019)
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025)
- [Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04218/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15564/) (2025)
- [GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05689/) (2025)
- [Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12820/) (2025)
- [CarLLaVA: Vision language models for camera-only closed-loop driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10165/) (2024)
- [Centaur: Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Test-Time Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11650/) (2025)
- [HiP-AD: Hierarchical and Multi-Granularity Planning with Deformable Attention for Autonomous Driving in a Single Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08612/) (2025)
- [Learning Personalized Driving Styles via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10434/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-Based Environment-Aware Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11643/) (2024)
- [QuAD: Query-based Interpretable Neural Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01486/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24044/) (2025)
- [DiffusionDriveV2: Reinforcement Learning-Constrained Truncated Diffusion Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07745/) (2025)
- [Driving on Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05083/) (2026)
- [SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23369/) (2025)
- [Latent-WAM: Latent World Action Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24581/) (2026)
- [IRL-VLA: Training an Vision-Language-Action Policy via Reward World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06571/) (2025)
- [SparseDriveV2: Scoring is All You Need for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29163/) (2026)
- [GuideFlow: Constraint-Guided Flow Matching for Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18729/) (2025)
- [Reinforced Refinement with Self-Aware Expansion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09800/) (2025)
- [DriveFine: Refining-Augmented Masked Diffusion VLA for Precise and Robust Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14577/) (2026)
- [DIVER: Reinforced Diffusion Breaks Imitation Bottlenecks in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04049/) (2025)
- [DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09701/) (2026)
- [PRIX: Learning to Plan from Raw Pixels for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17596/) (2025)
- [Zero-Human Demonstration End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Trajectory Scorer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24108/) (2025)
- [ResAD: Normalized Residual Trajectory Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08562/) (2025)
- [EvaDrive: Evolutionary Adversarial Policy Optimization for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09158/) (2025)
- [MindDrive: An All-in-One Framework Bridging World Models and Vision-Language Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04441/) (2025)
- [CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15120/) (2026)
- [Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15869/) (2026)
- [Percept-WAM: Perception-Enhanced World-Awareness-Action Model for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19221/) (2025)
- [SafeDrive: Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning for End-to-End Driving in a Sparse World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18887/) (2026)
- [RAD-2: Scaling Reinforcement Learning in a Generator-Discriminator Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15308/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07170/) (2026)
- [GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16274/) (2026)
- [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)
- [HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03581/) (2026)
- [DriveCritic: Towards Context-Aware, Human-Aligned Evaluation for Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13108/) (2025)
- [DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17362/) (2026)
- [DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06055/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end multi-modal planning is a promising paradigm in autonomous driving, enabling decision-making with diverse trajectory candidates. A key component is a robust trajectory scorer capable of selecting the optimal trajectory from these candidates. While recent trajectory scorers focus on scoring either large sets of static trajectories or small sets of dynamically generated ones, both approaches face significant limitations in generalization. Static vocabularies provide effective coarse discretization but struggle to make fine-grained adaptation, while dynamic proposals offer detailed precision but fail to capture broader trajectory distributions. To overcome these challenges, we propose GTRS (Generalized Trajectory Scoring), a unified framework for end-to-end multi-modal planning that combines coarse and fine-grained trajectory evaluation. GTRS consists of three complementary innovations: (1) a diffusion-based trajectory generator that produces diverse fine-grained proposals; (2) a vocabulary generalization technique that trains a scorer on super-dense trajectory sets with dropout regularization, enabling its robust inference on smaller subsets; and (3) a sensor augmentation strategy that enhances out-of-domain generalization while incorporating refinement training for critical trajectory discrimination. As the winning solution of the Navsim v2 Challenge, GTRS demonstrates superior performance even with sub-optimal sensor inputs, approaching privileged methods that rely on ground-truth perception. Code will be available at https://github.com/NVlabs/GTRS.