# Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing of End-to-End Driving Planners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14438 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14438/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Imitation-learning end-to-end planners, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Imitation-learning end-to-end planners](https://mlsanity.com/driving/imitation-learning-end-to-end-planners/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01332/) (2015)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11979/) (2019)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [Is Ego Status All You Need for Open-Loop End-to-End Autonomous Driving?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03031/) (2023)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)
- [PLUTO: Pushing the Limit of Imitation Learning-based Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14327/) (2024)
- [Centaur: Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Test-Time Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11650/) (2025)
- [Flattery in Motion: Benchmarking and Analyzing Sycophancy in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07180/) (2025)
- [CausalVAD: De-confounding End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18561/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07170/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking and Mitigating Sycophancy in Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21979/) (2025)
- [Beyond Patterns: Harnessing Causal Logic for Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06856/) (2025)
- [Structural Induced Exploration for Balanced and Scalable Multi-Robot Path Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21654/) (2025)
- [Cluster Aggregated GAN (CAG): A Cluster-Based Hybrid Model for Appliance Pattern Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22287/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.