Plug-and-Play Traffic Element Awareness for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Traffic elements such as traffic lights and road signs play a fundamental role in human driving decisions and should naturally influence end-to-end driving performance. However, existing end-to-end driving research predominantly focuses on dynamic road participants (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians), while the role of traffic elements remains largely unexplored. The community still lacks a systematic study quantifying their impact, largely because public datasets rarely provide structured traffic-element annotations and modern driving systems vary widely in architecture and training paradigm. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation of traffic element awareness for end-to-end autonomous driving. We construct a unified research infrastructure by augmenting multiple public driving datasets with comprehensive traffic-element annotations. To support diverse model families, we adopt a minimal and universal integration design that incorporates traffic-element signals into existing pipelines in a plug-and-play manner with negligible architectural modification. We evaluate this design across modern paradigms, including perception-prediction-planning pipelines, vision-language-action models (VLA), regression-based planners, diffusion-based policies, and trajectory-scoring frameworks, on nuScenes, NAVSIM-v1, NAVSIM-v2, and Bench2Drive. Across all paradigms and datasets, this simple integration consistently improves driving performance, demonstrating that traffic element awareness provides a robust and generalizable signal for end-to-end driving systems. Notably, on the challenging NAVSIM-v2 benchmark, our approach significantly improves state-of-the-art architectures and data pipelines, establishing a new state of the art.