mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

HEAT: Heterogeneous End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Trajectory-Guided World Models

arXiv 2605.19631 ↗First posted 19 May 2026cs.RO cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: World models → World models for autonomous driving

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a compelling alternative to traditional modular pipelines by directly mapping raw sensor data to driving actions. While recent approaches achieve strong performance on single-domain datasets, their performance degrades significantly when trained jointly across multiple heterogeneous domains. In practice, however, autonomous systems must operate across diverse environments with heterogeneous distributions, including different cities, sensor configurations, and traffic patterns, without domain-specific retraining. This gap highlights a key challenge in multi-domain learning: domain-specific variations across heterogeneous domains introduce conflicting learning signals, driving models toward compromised solutions that are suboptimal across domains. To address this, we propose a trajectory-driven learning paradigm that organizes training around planning trajectories, enabling the model to capture domain-invariant representations of driving intent. Furthermore, we incorporate a world model that predicts future latent features conditioned on ego actions, improving feature consistency and mitigating domain-induced biases. We evaluate our approach on three benchmarks, nuScenes, NAVSIM, and the Waymo end-to-end dataset, and show substantial improvements over existing methods across all domains. Our results demonstrate that a single unified model can be trained on heterogeneous datasets while maintaining strong performance within each domain, highlighting a step toward scalable real-world deployment. We will make our code publicly available.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for autonomous driving, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 31 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 May 2026.

Builds on

31 of 35 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model1 Jul
  2. 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model2 Apr
  3. 2024DrivingGPT: Unifying Driving World Modeling and Planning with Multi-modal Autoregressive Transformers24 Dec
  4. 2024Navigation-Guided Sparse Scene Representation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving26 Sep
  5. 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model12 Jun
  6. 2024DriveWorld: 4D Pre-trained Scene Understanding via World Models for Autonomous Driving7 May
  7. 2023Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving29 Nov
  8. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles22 Jun

Other references · 23

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2021Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windowscited by 12,139
  3. 2016SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restartscited by 5,045
  4. 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,523
  5. 2018UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reductioncited by 2,898
  6. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  7. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
  8. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontierscited by 490
  9. 2017End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learningcited by 485
  10. 2021Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 377
  11. 2022ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learningcited by 368
  12. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 354
11 more
  1. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 334
  2. 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 249
  3. 2022Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baselinecited by 248
  4. 2023Is Ego Status All You Need for Open-Loop End-to-End Autonomous Driving?cited by 242
  5. 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representationcited by 241
  6. 2023Scene as Occupancycited by 209
  7. 2023Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenescited by 191
  8. 2023Hidden Biases of End-to-End Driving Modelscited by 96
  9. 2024GEM: A Generalizable Ego-Vision Multimodal World Model for Fine-Grained Ego-Motion, Object Dynamics, and Scene Composition Controlcited by 78
  10. 2025CarPlanner: Consistent Auto-regressive Trajectory Planning for Large-scale Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Drivingcited by 34
  11. 2025VR-Drive: Viewpoint-Robust End-to-End Driving with Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splattingcited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026A Survey on End-to-End Autonomous Driving Training from the Perspectives of Data, Strategy, and Platform
  2. 2025TrajDiff: End-to-end Autonomous Driving without Perception Annotation
  3. 2026WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving
  4. 2025A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving
  5. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving using Deep Learning: A Systematic Review
  6. 2025RoCA: Robust Cross-Domain End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  7. 2025Trajectory World Models for Heterogeneous Environments
  8. 2026Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Driving