Autonomous driving paper index

DRIFT: Drift and Aggregation for Motion Planning

2026-07-16 · arXiv (Cornell University)

autonomous drivingend-to-endmotion planningplanning

One-line summary

We present DRIFT, a fixed-depth planner that combines one-step drifting in a compact trajectory latent space with scene-aware proposal aggregation.

Engineering notes

On NAVSIM navtest, DRIFT achieves 89.6 PDMS and 90.4 EPDMS, with strong drivable-area compliance and ego progress among the methods compared.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充:本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

End-to-end trajectory planners need to represent multiple plausible driving behaviors while producing a single executable trajectory under real-time constraints. Proposal-based approaches address this ambiguity by generating multiple candidates, but converting the proposal set into a final plan remains a key design problem. We present DRIFT, a fixed-depth planner that combines one-step drifting in a compact trajectory latent space with scene-aware proposal aggregation. Conditioned on features from a pretrained visual encoder, the DRIFT Decoder generates 48 proposal features in a single batched pass, with 32 samples at alpha=0.5 and 16 samples at alpha=0.9. A lightweight Aggregation Head integrates these features with scene, navigation, and ego-state information and directly predicts the final trajectory without requiring trajectory-level quality labels for aggregation. Its output is trained with expert-trajectory imitation and a map-derived boundary regularizer that penalizes waypoints outside the drivable polygon and inside waypoints near its boundary. On NAVSIM navtest, DRIFT achieves 89.6 PDMS and 90.4 EPDMS, with strong drivable-area compliance and ego progress among the methods compared. The proposal-generation and aggregation module runs in 10.82 ms on an NVIDIA RTX 4090, while full-model inference including the visual backbone takes 66.43 ms. These results show that one-step latent proposal generation and direct aggregation provide an efficient design for multi-hypothesis motion planning.

5.5Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
5.0Business relevance

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