# WZPlanner: Safe End-to-End Path Planning for Autonomous Driving in Work Zones

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19393 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19393/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLMs for autonomous driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 10 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [VLMs for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/vlms-for-autonomous-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025)
- [Hidden Biases of End-to-End Driving Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07957/) (2023)
- [LATR: 3D Lane Detection from Monocular Images with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04583/) (2023)
- [ROADWork: A Dataset and Benchmark for Learning to Recognize, Observe, Analyze and Drive Through Work Zones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07661/) (2024)
- [SparseLaneSTP: Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Priors with Sparse Transformers for 3D Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04968/) (2026)
- [Inside Knowledge: Graph-based Path Generation with Explainable Data Augmentation and Curriculum Learning for Visual Indoor Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11446/) (2025)
- [Framework and Multi-modal Dataset for Roadwork Zone Detection and Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04330/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Work zones alter lane geometry through temporary traffic controls and closures that may be absent from on-board maps, challenging autonomous vehicle (AV) perception and planning. Generalization is also limited by scarce public datasets with structured geometric supervision. We present WorkZonePlan, a dataset comprising 149K+ synthetic and 5K+ real-world multimodal samples with 3D annotations for lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectory options. It also provides 76 closed-loop CARLA scenarios replayed under three weather conditions, yielding 228 Bench2Drive-format evaluation routes. We introduce WAVE (Work-zone-focused AV data generation in Virtual and rEal Environments), a semi-automated pipeline for creating the dataset, and BoundaryFormer (BF), a transformer-based model that jointly predicts lane and work zone boundary polynomials and driving trajectories. BF uses slot attention for boundary prediction. Ablations show that a separate trajectory decoder using boundary slot features substantially improves trajectory prediction over a slot-attention-only approach. Building on this finding, BF++ offers Camera and Camera+LiDAR variants with metric ground-plane encoding, typed boundary/trajectory queries, long-range point anchors, image-space curve refinement, and conservative gated LiDAR fusion. On the 211 routes common to all four models at the evaluation freeze, BF++-Camera and BF++-Camera+LiDAR achieve Driving Scores of 63.0 and 64.4, respectively, compared with 59.3 for SimLingo and 26.1 for TransFuser++ (TF++). BF++ is 40 times smaller than SimLingo and more than 10 times smaller than TF++, while achieving higher Driving Scores. These results support jointly predicting lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectories as a promising direction toward safer AV operation in work zones. Code and dataset: https://github.com/Nishad-Sahu/WZPlanner.