EvaDrive: Evolutionary Adversarial Policy Optimization for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
On the map: End-to-end autonomous driving → Imitation-learning end-to-end planners
Abstract (arXiv)
Autonomous driving faces significant challenges in achieving human-like iterative decision-making, which continuously generates, evaluates, and refines trajectory proposals. Current generation-evaluation frameworks isolate trajectory generation from quality assessment, preventing iterative refinement essential for planning, while reinforcement learning methods collapse multi-dimensional preferences into scalar rewards, obscuring critical trade-offs and yielding scalarization bias.To overcome these issues, we present EvaDrive, a novel multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that establishes genuine closed-loop co-evolution between trajectory generation and evaluation via adversarial optimization. EvaDrive frames trajectory planning as a multi-round adversarial game. In this game, a hierarchical generator continuously proposes candidate paths by combining autoregressive intent modeling for temporal causality with diffusion-based refinement for spatial flexibility. These proposals are then rigorously assessed by a trainable multi-objective critic that explicitly preserves diverse preference structures without collapsing them into a single scalarization bias.This adversarial interplay, guided by a Pareto frontier selection mechanism, enables iterative multi-round refinement, effectively escaping local optima while preserving trajectory diversity.Extensive experiments on NAVSIM and Bench2Drive benchmarks demonstrate SOTA performance, achieving 94.9 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 (surpassing DiffusionDrive by 6.8, DriveSuprim by 5.0, and TrajHF by 0.9) and 64.96 Driving Score on Bench2Drive. EvaDrive generates diverse driving styles via dynamic weighting without external preference data, introducing a closed-loop adversarial framework for human-like iterative decision-making, offering a novel scalarization-free trajectory optimization approach.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Imitation-learning end-to-end planners, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving. Builds on 37 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2025.
Builds on
37 of 55 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025DIVER: Reinforced Diffusion Breaks Imitation Bottlenecks in End-to-End Autonomous Driving5 Jul
- 2025Learning Personalized Driving Styles via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback13 Mar
- 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning20 Feb
Other references · 34
- 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 37,240
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
- 2017Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variationcited by 2,988
- 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,449
- 2020Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Surveycited by 721
- 2018Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 690
- 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
- 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 485
- 2022ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learningcited by 368
- 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 354
22 more
- 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 249
- 2022Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baselinecited by 248
- 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representationcited by 241
- 2022Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformercited by 212
- 2023Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenescited by 191
- 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Modelcited by 166
- 2020UBAR: Towards Fully End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with GPT-2cited by 111
- 2025AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoningcited by 108
- 2025DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planningcited by 94
- 2024DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mambacited by 87
- 2019PhysGAN: Generating Physical-World-Resilient Adversarial Examples for Autonomous Drivingcited by 72
- 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 72
- 2020SurfelGAN: Synthesizing Realistic Sensor Data for Autonomous Drivingcited by 68
- 2025Generalized Trajectory Scoring for End-to-end Multimodal Planningcited by 67
- 2025Drive-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Planning in VLMs for Autonomous Driving with Reinforcement Learningcited by 38
- 2025AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 35
- 2025Plan-R1: Safe and Feasible Trajectory Planning as Language Modelingcited by 20
- 2024FASIONAD : FAst and Slow FusION Thinking Systems for Human-Like Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Feedbackcited by 18
- 2025FASIONAD++ : Integrating High-Level Instruction and Information Bottleneck in FAt-Slow fusION Systems for Enhanced Safety in Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Feedbackcited by 12
- 2025SafeMVDrive: Multi-view Safety-Critical Driving Video Synthesis in the Real World Domaincited by 7
- 2025LEGO-Motion: Learning-Enhanced Grids with Occupancy Instance Modeling for Class-Agnostic Motion Predictioncited by 6
- 2023Offline Reinforcement Learning for Mixture-of-Expert Dialogue Managementcited by 3
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 9.
12 papers.
- 2025SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scalecited by 36
- 2026Devil is in Narrow Policy: Unleashing Exploration in Driving VLA Modelscited by 15
- 2026CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planningcited by 11
- 2025DAP: A Discrete-token Autoregressive Planner for Autonomous Drivingcited by 4
- 2026DriveVLM-RL: Neuroscience-Inspired Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language Models for Safe and Deployable Autonomous Drivingcited by 4
- 2026HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Drivingcited by 4
- 2025DiffVLA++: Bridging Cognitive Reasoning and End-to-End Driving through Metric-Guided Alignmentcited by 3
- 2026DynFlowDrive: Flow-Based Dynamic World Modeling for Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
- 2026Post-Training in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
- 2026Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models What to See and Where to Lookcited by 1
- 2026VIPS: Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Planning Benchmark via Pseudo-Simulationcited by 0
- 2026DriveReferee: Geometric Safety Verdicts Need Not Be Learned for Driving World-Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026DriveReferee: Geometric Safety Verdicts Need Not Be Learned for Driving World-Action Models19 Sep 2026
- 2026VIPS: Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Planning Benchmark via Pseudo-Simulation2 Sep 2026
- 2026Post-Training in End-to-End Autonomous Driving9 Jul 2026
- 2026Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models What to See and Where to Look2 Jul 2026
- 2026CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planning14 May 2026
- 2026HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Driving4 Apr 2026
- 2026DynFlowDrive: Flow-Based Dynamic World Modeling for Autonomous Driving20 Mar 2026
- 2026DriveVLM-RL: Neuroscience-Inspired Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language Models for Safe and Deployable Autonomous Driving18 Mar 2026
- 2026Devil is in Narrow Policy: Unleashing Exploration in Driving VLA Models6 Mar 2026
- 2025SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale28 Nov 2025
- 2025DAP: A Discrete-token Autoregressive Planner for Autonomous Driving17 Nov 2025
- 2025DiffVLA++: Bridging Cognitive Reasoning and End-to-End Driving through Metric-Guided Alignment20 Oct 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Evaluation as Evolution: Transforming Adversarial Diffusion into Closed-Loop Curricula for Autonomous Vehicles
- 2024Gen-Drive: Enhancing Diffusion Generative Driving Policies with Reward Modeling and Reinforcement Learning Fine-tuning
- 2025DiffusionDriveV2: Reinforcement Learning-Constrained Truncated Diffusion Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- 2026Real-Time Evaluation of Autonomous Systems under Adversarial Attacks
- 2026ADV-0: Closed-Loop Min-Max Adversarial Training for Long-Tail Robustness in Autonomous Driving
- 2026Off the Rails: Hijacking the Scoring Head in Generative End-to-End Driving Planners with Safety-Violating Adversarial Perturbations
- 2024Diffusion-ES: Gradient-free Planning with Diffusion for Autonomous Driving and Zero-Shot Instruction Following
- 2022Hierarchical Model-Based Imitation Learning for Planning in Autonomous Driving