mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

DriveSafer: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Safety Guidance

arXiv 2605.16737 ↗First posted 16 May 2026cs.RO cs.CVcited by 0

On the map: End-to-end autonomous driving → Adversarial scenarios and safety testing

Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-End (E2E) autonomous driving models have shown growing capability in recent years, with performance improving on increasingly challenging benchmarks. However, modern generative E2E planners still suffer from a substantial number of catastrophic failures in safety-critical scenarios. We find that many such failures arise from violations of physical constraints and safety requirements, leading to unsafe behavior. Motivated by this finding, in this paper, we focus on improving safety outcomes in generative end-to-end driving with a targeted reduction of catastrophic planning failures, instead of enhancing average planning quality. Towards this end, we propose DriveSafer, a failure-aware safety framework for end-to-end planners. DriveSafer explicitly steers generative planners towards safe behaviors leveraging both training-time safety constraints and inference-time safety guidance. Compared to the state-of-the-art DiffusionDrive model, on the NAVSIM benchmark, DriveSafer reduces the number of catastrophic failures (PDMS=0) by 48%, with over 65% reduction in drivable-area compliance failures.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Adversarial scenarios and safety testing, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving. Builds on 38 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 May 2026.

Builds on

38 of 45 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving4 Jun
  2. 2023CAT: Closed-loop Adversarial Training for Safe End-to-End Driving19 Oct

Other references · 36

  1. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,068
  2. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 613
  3. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehiclescited by 485
  4. 2017End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learningcited by 479
  5. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 477
  6. 2019Learning by Cheatingcited by 361
  7. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 343
  8. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 324
  9. 2023Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 309
  10. 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 287
  11. 2025AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 252
  12. 2024Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 250
24 more
  1. 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 244
  2. 2023Is Ego Status All You Need for Open-Loop End-to-End Autonomous Driving?cited by 242
  3. 2023OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 230
  4. 2023Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenescited by 191
  5. 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generationcited by 177
  6. 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Modelcited by 161
  7. 2025SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignmentcited by 149
  8. 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Modelcited by 145
  9. 2023DriveAdapter: Breaking the Coupling Barrier of Perception and Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 142
  10. 2025Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidancecited by 138
  11. 2025Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tailcited by 136
  12. 2024DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mambacited by 87
  13. 2025WOD-E2E: Waymo Open Dataset for End-to-End Driving in Challenging Long-tail Scenarioscited by 60
  14. 2025DriveDPO: Policy Learning via Safety DPO For End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 39
  15. 2025HiP-AD: Hierarchical and Multi-Granularity Planning with Deformable Attention for Autonomous Driving in a Single Decodercited by 35
  16. 2025CaRL: Learning Scalable Planning Policies with Simple Rewardscited by 34
  17. 2025LEAD: Minimizing Learner-Expert Asymmetry in End-to-End Drivingcited by 22
  18. 2025DriveX: Omni Scene Modeling for Learning Generalizable World Knowledge in Autonomous Drivingcited by 20
  19. 2024MapLocNet: Coarse-to-Fine Feature Registration for Visual Re-Localization in Navigation Mapscited by 18
  20. 2025CoC-VLA: Delving into Adversarial Domain Transfer for Explainable Autonomous Driving via Chain-of-Causality Visual-Language-Action Modelcited by 5
  21. 2026Reasoning models do not yet follow their reasoning in autonomous driving: The KITScenes LongTail Datasetcited by 4
  22. 2024Real-time MPC with Control Barrier Functions for Autonomous Driving using Safety Enhanced Collocationcited by 3
  23. 2025A Real-Time Control Barrier Function-Based Safety Filter for Motion Planning with Arbitrary Road Boundary Constraintscited by 2
  24. 2026BEVMAPMATCH: Multimodal BEV Neural Map Matching for Robust Re-Localization of Autonomous Vehiclescited by 1

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving
  2. 2026NavSafe-∞: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Driving Safety in Photorealistic Environments
  3. 2026Beyond Imitation: Learning Safe End-to-End Autonomous Driving from Hard Negatives
  4. 2025Drive in Corridors: Enhancing the Safety of End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Corridor Learning and Planning
  5. 2026Herding End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Neuro-Symbolic Safety Guards
  6. 2026SafeDrive: Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning for End-to-End Driving in a Sparse World
  7. 2026Safe2Drive: Evaluating Safe Driving Behaviors of E2E Autonomous Driving Models
  8. 2025UniSTPA: A Safety Analysis Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving