Autonomous driving paper index

PLAN-S: Bridging Planning with Latent Style Dynamics for Autonomous Driving World Models

2026-06-04 · arXiv (Cornell University)

end-to-end autonomous drivingautonomous drivingend-to-endnuscenesplanningcontrol

One-line summary

We propose PLAN-S (PLANning with latent Style dynamics), a planner-facing bridge that addresses this compactness-controllability dilemma by decoding a style-conditioned, four-channel semantic cost map from the latent representation.

Engineering notes

Key topics: end-to-end autonomous driving, autonomous driving, end-to-end, nuscenes, planning, control. See the paper for implementation details and experimental results.

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

Latent world models (LWMs) have strengthened end-to-end autonomous driving by forecasting compact scene dynamics for downstream planning. However, existing LWM-based planners usually generate trajectories directly from entangled latent representations. This compact latent-to-planner pathway lacks explicit modeling of risk, drivability, and diverse style preferences, making driving-style dynamics difficult to supervise, inspect, or modulate before a final trajectory is selected. We propose PLAN-S (PLANning with latent Style dynamics), a planner-facing bridge that addresses this compactness-controllability dilemma by decoding a style-conditioned, four-channel semantic cost map from the latent representation. The cost map is conditioned on ego state and driving style and is consumed up-stream of the planning decision through two host-side interfaces: attention-level fusion for regression planners and reward-level fusion for anchor-score planners. We validate PLAN-S on two architecturally distinct hosts, ResWorld on nuScenes and WoTE on NAVSIM, while keeping the host backbones frozen to isolate the contribution of the proposed bridge. On nuScenes, PLAN-S reduces L2 at every horizon over the baseline, with 0.55 m average L2 and a 42% relative reduction in the 3 s collision rate. On NAVSIM, the rule-cost variant reaches 89.4 Predictive Driver Model Score (PDMS), while the learned cost variant provides complementary gains on baseline-challenging scenes. Ablations show that the cost pathway contributes most directly to safer trajectory selection. Qualitative results further show that PLAN-S can produce diverse cost maps, with spatially consistent variations aligned to different driving styles.

6.0Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
5.0Business relevance

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