# RAP: 3D Rasterization Augmented End-to-End Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 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 43 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Imitation-learning end-to-end planners](https://mlsanity.com/driving/imitation-learning-end-to-end-planners/)
- 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 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Large Scale Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving : The Waymo Open Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10133/) (2021)
- [NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11810/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [Tri-Perspective View for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07817/) (2023)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MetaDrive: Composing Diverse Driving Scenarios for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12674/) (2021)
- [AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13757/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10430/) (2023)
- [Model-Based Imitation Learning for Urban Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07729/) (2022)
- [Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04218/) (2025)
- [End-to-End Model-Free Reinforcement Learning for Urban Driving using Implicit Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10868/) (2019)
- [Generating Useful Accident-Prone Driving Scenarios via a Learned Traffic Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05077/) (2021)
- [SelfOcc: Self-Supervised Vision-Based 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12754/) (2023)
- [DriveTransformer: Unified Transformer for Scalable End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07656/) (2025)
- [LGSVL Simulator: A High Fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03778/) (2020)
- [CIRL: Controllable Imitative Reinforcement Learning for Vision-based Self-driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03776/) (2018)
- [KING: Generating Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios for Robust Imitation via Kinematics Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13683/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16760/) (2025)
- [UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02190/) (2026)
- [SpanVLA: Efficient Action Bridging and Learning from Negative-Recovery Samples for Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19710/) (2026)
- [EponaV2: Driving World Model with Comprehensive Future Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14696/) (2026)
- [CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15120/) (2026)
- [SimWAM: A Simple World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07468/) (2026)
- [Qwen-Drive-1.0: An Initial Step towards a Vision-Language Foundation Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00111/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07170/) (2026)
- [RoaD: Rollouts as Demonstrations for Closed-Loop Supervised Fine-Tuning of Autonomous Driving Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01993/) (2025)
- [Do Open-Loop Metrics Predict Closed-Loop Driving? A Cross-Benchmark Correlation Study of NAVSIM and Bench2Drive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00066/) (2026)
- [MindVLA-U1: VLA Beats VA with Unified Streaming Architecture for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12624/) (2026)
- [ChainFlow-VLA: Causal Flow Planning with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23270/) (2026)
- [Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19641/) (2026)
- [VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12396/) (2026)
- [GeoWAM: Visual Geometry World Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23486/) (2026)
- [DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06055/) (2026)
- [NTR: Neural Token Reconstruction for Scene Token Bottleneck in End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31116/) (2026)
- [DriveMA: Driving Vision-Language-Action Models with verifiable Meta-Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31271/) (2026)
- [IDOL: Inverse-Dynamics-Guided Future Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31476/) (2026)
- [Pictura: Perspective-View Self-Play at Scale for Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26005/) (2026)
- [Action Emergence from Streaming Intent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12622/) (2026)
- [Driving Intents Amplify Planning-Oriented Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12625/) (2026)
- [DriveMA: Rethinking Language Interfaces in Driving VLAs with One-Step Meta-Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21273/) (2026)
- [ProOOD: Prototype-Guided Out-of-Distribution 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01081/) (2026)
- [Is Your Trajectory Displacement Safe in Long-tail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16313/) (2026)
- [SPHINX: First Explain, Then Explore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17482/) (2026)
- [DriveStack-VLA: Render-Teacher Alignment for BEV-Based DeepStack Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24051/) (2026)
- [Mirror Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28737/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Imitation learning for end-to-end driving trains policies only on expert demonstrations. Once deployed in a closed loop, such policies lack recovery data: small mistakes cannot be corrected and quickly compound into failures. A promising direction is to generate alternative viewpoints and trajectories beyond the logged path. Prior work explores photorealistic digital twins via neural rendering or game engines, but these methods are prohibitively slow and costly, and thus mainly used for evaluation. In this work, we argue that photorealism is unnecessary for training end-to-end planners. What matters is semantic fidelity and scalability: driving depends on geometry and dynamics, not textures or lighting. Motivated by this, we propose 3D Rasterization, which replaces costly rendering with lightweight rasterization of annotated primitives, enabling augmentations such as counterfactual recovery maneuvers and cross-agent view synthesis. To transfer these synthetic views effectively to real-world deployment, we introduce a Raster-to-Real feature-space alignment that bridges the sim-to-real gap. Together, these components form Rasterization Augmented Planning (RAP), a scalable data augmentation pipeline for planning. RAP achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop robustness and long-tail generalization, ranking first on four major benchmarks: NAVSIM v1/v2, Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, and Bench2Drive. Our results show that lightweight rasterization with feature alignment suffices to scale E2E training, offering a practical alternative to photorealistic rendering. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/RAP/.