Beyond Waypoint Regression: Query-Based Cost Learning over Reachable Ego Futures for End-to-End Driving

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.08123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end planners based on waypoint regression achieve strong open-loop accuracy, but they primarily learn to mimic expert geometry and remain difficult to adapt to deployment-time safety constraints. We propose a query-based cost-learning framework that estimates bounded costs for dynamically reachable ego trajectory queries, rather than dense BEV cells or a small regressed trajectory set. Compact joint scene tokens capture coherent multimodal