Autonomous driving paper index

FactorDrive: Adaptive Multi-Step Reasoning Driven by Planning-Critical Factors for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

2026-08-10 · arXiv (Cornell University)

end-to-end autonomous drivingautonomous drivingend-to-endtrajectory planningnuscenesplanning

One-line summary

To address these limitations, we propose FactorDrive, an end-to-end autonomous driving framework for adaptive multi-step reasoning driven by planning-critical factors (PCFs).

Engineering notes

Extensive experiments on both open-loop (nuScenes) and closed-loop-oriented (NAVSIM) benchmarks demonstrate that FactorDrive achieves state-of-the-art planning performance.

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

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced scene understanding and enabled explicit reasoning in end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing methods insufficiently integrate spatial-physical evidence into planning reasoning, while reasoning adaptation remains coarse-grained and falls short of scene-specific planning demands. Furthermore, reasoning-path optimization for higher planning quality remains largely unexplored in autonomous-driving post-training. To address these limitations, we propose FactorDrive, an end-to-end autonomous driving framework for adaptive multi-step reasoning driven by planning-critical factors (PCFs). We first perform large-scale driving-domain instruction tuning to establish foundational driving knowledge. Building on this foundation, we construct PCF-CoT, a chain-of-thought (CoT) dataset that grounds planning reasoning in trajectory-relevant spatial-physical evidence and organizes reasoning around scene-specific PCFs, enabling the composition and depth of reasoning paths to adapt to different planning demands. We further introduce Quality Search-Guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (QS-GRPO), which guides Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with trajectory-level planning rewards to discover reasoning paths with higher planning quality and uses the resulting responses to optimize the policy through GRPO, thereby improving trajectory planning performance. Extensive experiments on both open-loop (nuScenes) and closed-loop-oriented (NAVSIM) benchmarks demonstrate that FactorDrive achieves state-of-the-art planning performance.

6.0Engineering value
8.0Research novelty
5.0Business relevance

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