Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20111v1
• Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:41:36 GMT
• Title: Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms
• Abstract summary: End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from camera-to-control regression toward planning-oriented systems.<n>This survey reviews this transition across behavior cloning, conditional imitation learning, privileged distillation, BEV and vectorized planning.<n>We argue that the key distinction in modern end-to-end driving is not whether intermediate representations are used, but whether they are learned, supervised, and evaluated to support safe, feasible, and route-compliant planning.
• Score: 33.863182759843845
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from camera-to-control regression toward planning-oriented systems that use structured representations, trajectory-level outputs, and increasingly realistic evaluation protocols. This survey reviews this transition across behavior cloning, conditional imitation learning, privileged distillation, BEV and vectorized planning, unified perception-prediction-planning architectures, world-model-based planners, and vision-language-action systems. We argue that the key distinction in modern end-to-end driving is not whether intermediate representations are used, but whether they are learned, supervised, and evaluated to support safe, feasible, and route-compliant planning. To organize the literature, we synthesize existing methods along four axes: input representation, planning output, supervision signal, and evaluation protocol. We further examine the benchmark shift from open-loop trajectory matching to closed-loop simulation, non-reactive real-log evaluation, long-tail testing, and human-preference-aware metrics. Our analysis highlights that architectural progress is difficult to interpret without benchmark-consistent evaluation, and that displacement-based open-loop metrics alone provide limited evidence for safe and human-aligned driving. We conclude with open challenges in uncertainty-aware planning, learner-expert mismatch, runtime safety assurance, language-action grounding, world-model validation, and reproducible benchmarking.

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