# Reinforced Refinement with Self-Aware Expansion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09800 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09800/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 85 of its 115 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Reinforcement learning for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/reinforcement-learning-for-driving/)
- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Imitation and offline RL for driving](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/imitation-and-offline-rl-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (2025)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00444/) (2020)
- [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)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [Deep Evidential Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02600/) (2019)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01415/) (2023)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (2024)
- [LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09673/) (2024)
- [Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17918/) (2023)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08265/) (2021)
- [BEVerse: Unified Perception and Prediction in Birds-Eye-View for Vision-Centric Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09743/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10430/) (2023)
- [Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06242/) (2023)
- [Posterior Network: Uncertainty Estimation without OOD Samples via Density-Based Pseudo-Counts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09239/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23369/) (2025)
- [SpaceDrive: Infusing Spatial Awareness into VLM-based Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10719/) (2025)
- [MindDrive: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Autonomous Driving via Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13636/) (2025)
- [UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02190/) (2026)
- [DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09701/) (2026)
- [AD-R1: Closed-Loop Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Impartial World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20325/) (2025)
- [RAD-2: Scaling Reinforcement Learning in a Generator-Discriminator Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15308/) (2026)
- [Generative Scenario Rollouts for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11475/) (2026)
- [VDRive: Leveraging Reinforced VLA and Diffusion Policy for End-to-end Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15446/) (2025)
- [Fine-tuning is Not Enough: A Parallel Framework for Collaborative Imitation and Reinforcement Learning in End-to-end Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13842/) (2026)
- [DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06055/) (2026)
- [Optimization-Guided Diffusion for Interactive Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07661/) (2025)
- [CRAFT: Counterfactual-to-Interactive Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Driving Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04470/) (2026)
- [MAPLE: Latent Multi-Agent Play for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14201/) (2026)
- [Continuous Actions from Discrete Minds: Latent-Aligned Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04070/) (2026)
- [Evaluation as Evolution: Transforming Adversarial Diffusion into Closed-Loop Curricula for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07378/) (2026)
- [A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Preserving Policy Compatibility Under Perception Updates in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21509/) (2026)
- [VIPS: Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Planning Benchmark via Pseudo-Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02462/) (2026)
- [A Survey on End-to-End Autonomous Driving Training from the Perspectives of Data, Strategy, and Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a promising paradigm for directly mapping sensor inputs to planning maneuvers using learning-based modular integrations. However, existing imitation learning (IL)-based models suffer from generalization to hard cases, and a lack of corrective feedback loop under post-deployment. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a potential solution to tackle hard cases with optimality, it is often hindered by overfitting to specific driving cases, resulting in catastrophic forgetting of generalizable knowledge and sample inefficiency. To overcome these challenges, we propose Reinforced Refinement with Self-aware Expansion (R2SE), a novel learning pipeline that constantly refines hard domain while keeping generalizable driving policy for model-agnostic end-to-end driving systems. Through reinforcement fine-tuning and policy expansion that facilitates continuous improvement, R2SE features three key components: 1) Generalist Pretraining with hard-case allocation trains a generalist imitation learning (IL) driving system while dynamically identifying failure-prone cases for targeted refinement; 2) Residual Reinforced Specialist Fine-tuning optimizes residual corrections using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve performance in hard case domain while preserving global driving knowledge; 3) Self-aware Adapter Expansion dynamically integrates specialist policies back into the generalist model, enhancing continuous performance improvement. Experimental results in closed-loop simulation and real-world datasets demonstrate improvements in generalization, safety, and long-horizon policy robustness over state-of-the-art E2E systems, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforce refinement for scalable autonomous driving.