TrajDiff: End-to-end Autonomous Driving without Perception Annotation
On the map: End-to-end autonomous driving → End-to-end system architecture
Abstract (arXiv)
End-to-end autonomous driving systems directly generate driving policies from raw sensor inputs. While these systems can extract effective environmental features for planning, relying on auxiliary perception tasks, developing perception annotation-free planning paradigms has become increasingly critical due to the high cost of manual perception annotation. In this work, we propose TrajDiff, a Trajectory-oriented BEV Conditioned Diffusion framework that establishes a fully perception annotation-free generative method for end-to-end autonomous driving. TrajDiff requires only raw sensor inputs and future trajectory, constructing Gaussian BEV heatmap targets that inherently capture driving modalities. We design a simple yet effective trajectory-oriented BEV encoder to extract the TrajBEV feature without perceptual supervision. Furthermore, we introduce Trajectory-oriented BEV Diffusion Transformer (TB-DiT), which leverages ego-state information and the predicted TrajBEV features to directly generate diverse yet plausible trajectories, eliminating the need for handcrafted motion priors. Beyond architectural innovations, TrajDiff enables exploration of data scaling benefits in the annotation-free setting. Evaluated on the NAVSIM benchmark, TrajDiff achieves 87.5 PDMS, establishing state-of-the-art performance among all annotation-free methods. With data scaling, it further improves to 88.5 PDMS, which is comparable to advanced perception-based approaches. Our code and model will be made publicly available.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving. Builds on 41 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2025.
Builds on
41 of 49 references.
Closest ancestors · 12
Same direction, newest first
- 2025World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model1 Jul
- 2025DiffE2E: Rethinking End-to-End Driving with a Hybrid Action Diffusion and Supervised Policy26 May
- 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model2 Apr
- 2025Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Training15 Mar
- 2025DriveTransformer: Unified Transformer for Scalable End-to-End Autonomous Driving7 Mar
- 2024Navigation-Guided Sparse Scene Representation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving26 Sep
- 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking21 Jun
- 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model12 Jun
- 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation30 May
- 2024FipTR: A Simple yet Effective Transformer Framework for Future Instance Prediction in Autonomous Driving19 Apr
- 2023Is Ego Status All You Need for Open-Loop End-to-End Autonomous Driving?5 Dec
- 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving31 May
Other references · 29
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
- 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
- 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,730
- 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,526
- 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,198
- 2019FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detectioncited by 1,573
- 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,068
- 2018CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypointscited by 763
- 2021BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-Viewcited by 711
- 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 613
17 more
- 2022PETR: Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detectioncited by 550
- 2018ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worstcited by 391
- 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 324
- 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 287
- 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 244
- 2023MotionDiffuser: Controllable Multi-Agent Motion Prediction using Diffusioncited by 210
- 2025Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidancecited by 138
- 2021Urban Driver: Learning to Drive from Real-world Demonstrations Using Policy Gradientscited by 122
- 2025GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 117
- 2023ReasonNet: End-to-End Driving with Temporal and Global Reasoningcited by 92
- 2024PLUTO: Pushing the Limit of Imitation Learning-based Planning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 84
- 2024A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlookcited by 65
- 2024UniTraj: A Unified Framework for Scalable Vehicle Trajectory Predictioncited by 51
- 2024Gen-Drive: Enhancing Diffusion Generative Driving Policies with Reward Modeling and Reinforcement Learning Fine-tuningcited by 41
- 2024HPNet: Dynamic Trajectory Forecasting with Historical Prediction Attentioncited by 37
- 2021Exploring Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving with Feedback Synthesizer and Differentiable Rasterizationcited by 22
- 2024Optimizing Diffusion Models for Joint Trajectory Prediction and Controllable Generationcited by 18
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 7.
8 papers.
- 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Futurecited by 32
- 2026Bridging Scene Generation and Planning: Driving with World Model via Unifying Vision and Motion Representationcited by 13
- 2026CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 10
- 2026ChainFlow-VLA: Causal Flow Planning with Vision-Language Modelscited by 3
- 2026Truncated Rectified Flow Policy for Reinforcement Learning with One-Step Samplingcited by 2
- 2026D3-MoE:Dual Disentangled Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts for Style-Controllable End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026Driving on Registers, Reasoning on Risk: Risk-Aware Occupancy for Register-Based End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving7 Oct 2026
- 2026Driving on Registers, Reasoning on Risk: Risk-Aware Occupancy for Register-Based End-to-End Autonomous Driving18 Sep 2026
- 2026D3-MoE:Dual Disentangled Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts for Style-Controllable End-to-End Autonomous Driving3 Jun 2026
- 2026ChainFlow-VLA: Causal Flow Planning with Vision-Language Models22 May 2026
- 2026CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving11 May 2026
- 2026Truncated Rectified Flow Policy for Reinforcement Learning with One-Step Sampling10 Apr 2026
- 2026Bridging Scene Generation and Planning: Driving with World Model via Unifying Vision and Motion Representation16 Mar 2026
- 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future18 Dec 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms
- 2025TransDiffuser: Diverse Trajectory Generation with Decorrelated Multi-modal Representation for End-to-end Autonomous Driving
- 2025Using Ensemble Diffusion to Estimate Uncertainty for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- 2025DiffRefiner: Coarse to Fine Trajectory Planning via Diffusion Refinement with Semantic Interaction for End to End Autonomous Driving
- 2026What Matters for Scalable and Robust Learning in End-to-End Driving Planners?
- 2025Future-Aware End-to-End Driving: Bidirectional Modeling of Trajectory Planning and Scene Evolution
- 2025Perception in Plan: Coupled Perception and Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- 2025AnchDrive: Bootstrapping Diffusion Policies with Hybrid Trajectory Anchors for End-to-End Driving