mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Benchmarking Autonomous Driving Planners Across Leaderboards: A Unified CARLA-Based Evaluation

arXiv 2509.22754 ↗First posted 26 Sep 2025cs.RO cs.AI cs.CVcited by 0

On the map: End-to-end autonomous driving → End-to-end system architecture

Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving remains a highly active research domain that seeks to enable vehicles to perceive dynamic environments, predict the future trajectories of traffic agents such as vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists and plan safe and efficient future motions. To advance the field, several competitive platforms and benchmarks have been established to provide standardized datasets and evaluation protocols. Each offers a unique dataset and challenging planning problems spanning a wide range of driving scenarios and conditions. In this study, we present a comparative case study of representative motion planning methods drawn from major benchmark ecosystems, including CARLA, nuPlan, and the Waymo Open Dataset. To ensure a fair and unified evaluation, we adopt CARLA Leaderboard v2.1 as our common evaluation platform and evaluate eight representative methods: TF++, InterFuser, TCP, PDM-Lite, MTR+MPC, CaRL, PlanT 2.0, Diffusion planner. By highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, we identify prevailing trends, common challenges, and potential directions for advancing motion-planning research.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving. Builds on 31 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

Builds on

31 of 44 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025DriveTransformer: Unified Transformer for Scalable End-to-End Autonomous Driving7 Mar
  2. 2024Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving6 Jun
  3. 2023Drive Anywhere: Generalizable End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Multi-modal Foundation Models26 Oct
  4. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers29 Jun
  5. 2023Hidden Biases of End-to-End Driving Models13 Jun
  6. 2022Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline16 Jun
  7. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving31 May
  8. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles22 Jun
  9. 2021Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving19 Apr

Other references · 22

  1. 2019Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Datasetcited by 2,436
  2. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,068
  3. 2023GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 618
  4. 2021Large Scale Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving : The Waymo Open Motion Datasetcited by 532
  5. 2023DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answeringcited by 527
  6. 2022Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinementcited by 267
  7. 2023DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 258
  8. 2022Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformercited by 211
  9. 2021End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coachcited by 191
  10. 2021NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 174
  11. 2023Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Researchcited by 158
  12. 2023MTR++: Multi-Agent Motion Prediction with Symmetric Scene Modeling and Guided Intention Queryingcited by 139
10 more
  1. 2025Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidancecited by 138
  2. 2023Visual Point Cloud Forecasting enables Scalable Autonomous Drivingcited by 97
  3. 2022Differentiable Integrated Motion Prediction and Planning with Learnable Cost Function for Autonomous Drivingcited by 71
  4. 2023TrafficBots: Towards World Models for Autonomous Driving Simulation and Motion Predictioncited by 56
  5. 2025CaRL: Learning Scalable Planning Policies with Simple Rewardscited by 34
  6. 2023Multiverse Transformer: 1st Place Solution for Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge 2023cited by 25
  7. 2022MTR-A: 1st Place Solution for 2022 Waymo Open Dataset Challenge -- Motion Predictioncited by 17
  8. 2023Applications of Large Scale Foundation Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 14
  9. 2024CIMRL: Combining IMitation and Reinforcement Learning for Safe Autonomous Drivingcited by 12
  10. 2020Driving Through Ghosts: Behavioral Cloning with False Positivescited by 8

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026TaCarla: A comprehensive benchmarking dataset for end-to-end autonomous driving
  2. 2024Analysis of a Modular Autonomous Driving Architecture: The Top Submission to CARLA Leaderboard 2.0 Challenge
  3. 2024Towards learning-based planning:The nuPlan benchmark for real-world autonomous driving
  4. 2025Results of the 2024 CommonRoad Motion Planning Competition for Autonomous Vehicles
  5. 2026SparseDriveV2: Scoring is All You Need for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  6. 2023PaaS: Planning as a Service for reactive driving in CARLA Leaderboard
  7. 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator
  8. 2026CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planning