# Causality-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Ego-Centric Joint Scene Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 56 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [End-to-end system architecture](https://mlsanity.com/driving/end-to-end-system-architecture/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [Wayformer: Motion Forecasting via Simple & Efficient Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05844/) (2022)
- [Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13508/) (2022)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06679/) (2021)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)
- [GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11502/) (2024)
- [ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08052/) (2025)
- [NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04456/) (2021)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08481/) (2024)
- [Scene Transformer: A unified architecture for predicting multiple agent trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08417/) (2021)
- [MotionLM: Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting as Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16534/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01941/) (2025)
- [Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00088/) (2025)
- [Latent Variable Sequential Set Transformers For Joint Multi-Agent Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00563/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Data-Driven Risk Fields for Safer End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10377/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end autonomous driving, which bypasses traditional modular pipelines by directly predicting future trajectories from sensor inputs, has recently achieved substantial progress. However, existing methods often overlook the causal inter-dependencies in ego-vehicle planning, ignoring the reciprocal relations between the ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This causal oversight leads to inconsistent and unreliable trajectory predictions, especially in interaction-critical scenarios where ego decisions and neighboring agent behaviors must be reasoned about jointly. To address this limitation, we propose CaAD, a Causality-aware end-to-end Autonomous Driving framework that captures these dependencies within a shared latent scene representation. First, we propose an ego-centric joint-causal modeling module that builds on the marginal prediction branch, and learns causal dependencies between the ego vehicle and interaction-relevant agents. Second, we employ a causality-aware policy alignment stage implemented with joint-mode embeddings to align the stochastic ego policy with planning-oriented closed-loop feedback computed from surrounding traffic and map context. On the Bench2Drive and NAVSIM benchmarks, CaAD demonstrates strong closed-loop planning performance, achieving a Driving Score of 87.53 and Success Rate of 71.81 on Bench2Drive, and a PDMS of 91.1 on NAVSIM. The project page is available at https://moonseokha.github.io/CaAD/.