mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SparseDriveV2: Scoring is All You Need for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2603.29163 ↗First posted 31 Mar 2026cs.CVcited by 26

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

Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end multi-modal planning has been widely adopted to model the uncertainty of driving behavior, typically by scoring candidate trajectories and selecting the optimal one. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: scoring a large static trajectory vocabulary, or scoring a small set of dynamically generated proposals. While static vocabularies often suffer from coarse discretization of the action space, dynamic proposals provide finer-grained precision and have shown stronger empirical performance on existing benchmarks. However, it remains unclear whether dynamic generation is fundamentally necessary, or whether static vocabularies can already achieve comparable performance when they are sufficiently dense to cover the action space. In this work, we start with a systematic scaling study of Hydra-MDP, a representative scoring-based method, revealing that performance consistently improves as trajectory anchors become denser, without exhibiting saturation before computational constraints are reached. Motivated by this observation, we propose SparseDriveV2 to push the performance boundary of scoring-based planning through two complementary innovations: (1) a scalable vocabulary representation with a factorized structure that decomposes trajectories into geometric paths and velocity profiles, enabling combinatorial coverage of the action space, and (2) a scalable scoring strategy with coarse factorized scoring over paths and velocity profiles followed by fine-grained scoring on a small set of composed trajectories. By combining these two techniques, SparseDriveV2 achieves 92.0 PDMS and 90.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM, with 89.15 Driving Score and 70.00 Success Rate on Bench2Drive with a lightweight ResNet-34 as backbone. Code and model are released at https://github.com/swc-17/SparseDriveV2.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving. Builds on 34 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2026.

Builds on

34 of 37 references.

Closest ancestors · 16

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025iPad: Iterative Proposal-centric End-to-End Autonomous Driving21 May
  2. 2025ARTEMIS: Autoregressive End-to-End Trajectory Planning with Mixture of Experts for Autonomous Driving28 Apr
  3. 2025Fully Unified Motion Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving17 Apr
  4. 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model2 Apr
  5. 2025Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillation17 Mar
  6. 2025Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Training15 Mar
  7. 2025HiP-AD: Hierarchical and Multi-Granularity Planning with Deformable Attention for Autonomous Driving in a Single Decoder11 Mar
  8. 2025DriveTransformer: Unified Transformer for Scalable End-to-End Autonomous Driving7 Mar
  9. 2024DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mamba7 Aug
  10. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking21 Jun
  11. 2024Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving6 Jun
  12. 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation30 May
4 more
  1. 2023DriveAdapter: Breaking the Coupling Barrier of Perception and Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving1 Aug
  2. 2023Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenes17 May
  3. 2022Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline16 Jun
  4. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving31 May

Other references · 18

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
  3. 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,449
  4. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  5. 2021BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-Viewcited by 713
  6. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
  7. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 334
  8. 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 289
  9. 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 249
  10. 2024GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 225
  11. 2019An Energy and GPU-Computation Efficient Backbone Network for Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 163
  12. 2022Sparse4D: Multi-view 3D Object Detection with Sparse Spatial-Temporal Fusioncited by 162
6 more
  1. 2025SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignmentcited by 150
  2. 2025GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 120
  3. 2025DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planningcited by 94
  4. 2025Generalized Trajectory Scoring for End-to-end Multimodal Planningcited by 67
  5. 2025DiffusionDriveV2: Reinforcement Learning-Constrained Truncated Diffusion Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 56
  6. 2025DIVER: Reinforced Diffusion Breaks Imitation Bottlenecks in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 17

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 26.

26 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 17
  2. 2026CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planningcited by 11
  3. 2026RAD-2: Scaling Reinforcement Learning in a Generator-Discriminator Frameworkcited by 8
  4. 2026Test-Time Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Drivingcited by 7
  5. 2026Do Open-Loop Metrics Predict Closed-Loop Driving? A Cross-Benchmark Correlation Study of NAVSIM and Bench2Drivecited by 6
  6. 2026WA-JEPA: Rethinking the Video JEPA Paradigm for World-Action Modeling in Autonomous Drivingcited by 6
  7. 2026DA-WAM: Decision-Aligned Future Latents for Driving World Modelscited by 5
  8. 2026Discrete-WAM: Unified Discrete Vision-Action Token Editing for World-Policy Learningcited by 4
  9. 2026CRAFT: Counterfactual-to-Interactive Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Driving Policiescited by 2
  10. 2026NTR: Neural Token Reconstruction for Scene Token Bottleneck in End-to-End Drivingcited by 2
  11. 2026CLEAR: Cognition and Latent Evaluation for Adaptive Routing in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
  12. 2026HiDrive: A Closed-Loop Benchmark for High-Level Autonomous Drivingcited by 1
14 more
  1. 2026Causality-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Ego-Centric Joint Scene Modelingcited by 1
  2. 2026Large Discrete Policy: Advancing Explicit Behavior Modeling with Stochastic Iterative Scoringcited by 1
  3. 2026MM-Future: Multi-Mode Joint World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Drivingcited by 1
  4. 2026DriveReferee: Geometric Safety Verdicts Need Not Be Learned for Driving World-Action Modelscited by 0
  5. 2026NavSafe-∞: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Driving Safety in Photorealistic Environmentscited by 0
  6. 2026DreamStream: Towards Policy-Oriented Generative Simulation for End-to-End Drivingcited by 0
  7. 2026MomWorld: Momentum-Aware Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  8. 2026PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  9. 2026Taming an End-to-End Autonomous Driving Policy for Urban Navigation of Quadruped Robotscited by 0
  10. 2026BridgeGuard: Explicit Safety Drift for Diffusion-based Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  11. 2026FPD-Drive: Future Policy Distillation for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  12. 2026MORE: Learning Motion-Oriented Registers for Driving World Models and Planningcited by 0
  13. 2026ConDenseDrive: Knowledge-Dense, Token-Sparse Visual Encoder for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  14. 2026VITAL: From Visual Motion to Precise Actioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SparseWorld: Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving via World Models with Sparse Scene Representation
  2. 2025A Framework for Learning Scoring Rules in Autonomous Driving Planning Systems
  3. 2025Benchmarking Autonomous Driving Planners Across Leaderboards: A Unified CARLA-Based Evaluation
  4. 2026Efficient Multi-Modal Planning with Reward-Guided Preference Optimization for Autonomous Driving
  5. 2025Map-World: Masked Action planning and Path-Integral World Model for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2026Lagrange: An Open-Vocabulary, Energy-Based Sparse Framework for Generalized End-to-End Driving
  7. 2026Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms
  8. 2026Driving on Registers, Reasoning on Risk: Risk-Aware Occupancy for Register-Based End-to-End Autonomous Driving