# Safety-Oriented Trajectory Ranking from BEV Perception Outputs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14066 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14066/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01999/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [M2BEV: Multi-Camera Joint 3D Detection and Segmentation with Unified Birds-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05088/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01941/) (2025)
- [Training Agents Inside of Scalable World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24527/) (2025)
- [Differentiable Integrated Motion Prediction and Planning with Learnable Cost Function for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10422/) (2022)
- [Deep Structured Reactive Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06832/) (2021)
- [Learning to Map Vehicles into Bird's Eye View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08442/) (2017)
- [Modeling Robotics Dataset Construction as an Artifact-Based Build Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00162/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representations are increasingly used as compact inputs for autonomous driving perception and planning. However, lightweight and interpretable methods for evaluating candidate ego trajectories directly on BEV outputs remain useful for vehicular safety workflows, rapid prototyping, and human-in-the-loop validation. This paper presents a modular trajectory ranking pipeline that consumes BEVFusion object detections and map segmentations derived from nuScenes sensor data and ranks manually specified candidate trajectories according to safety-first criteria. The ranking prioritizes avoiding collisions and walkway violations, then smaller end distance to the target, and finally path efficiency. To study whether these rule-based rankings resemble human judgment, we created seven BEV traffic scenarios and compared the script output with preferences from a survey of 21 participants. Across 146 pairwise votes, 124 matched the trajectory ranked first by the evaluator, corresponding to an overall agreement of 84.9 %. The results indicate that simple BEV-centric safety heuristics can approximate human preferences in constrained trajectory choice tasks while remaining transparent enough for analysis, dataset curation, and autonomous driving studies.
