2025/05/08 by Peng Liu, Liu, Wenru, Jun Ma +2 · 4 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Reinforcement Learning in Robotics #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.05360
openalex publication_date 2025/05/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present DSDrive, a streamlined end-to-end paradigm tailored for integrating the reasoning and planning of autonomous vehicles into a unified framework. DSDrive leverages a compact LLM that employs a distillation method to preserve the enhanced reasoning capabilities of a larger-sized vision language model (VLM). To effectively align the reasoning and planning tasks, a waypoint-driven dual-head coordination module is further developed, which synchronizes dataset structures, optimization objectives, and the learning process. By integrating these tasks into a unified framework, DSDrive anchors on the planning results while incorporating detailed reasoning insights, thereby enhancing the interpretability and reliability of the end-to-end pipeline. DSDrive has been thoroughly tested in closed-loop simulations, where it performs on par with benchmark models and even outperforms in many key metrics, all while being more compact in size. Additionally, the computational efficiency of DSDrive (as reflected in its time and memory requirements during inference) has been significantly enhanced. Evidently thus, this work brings promising aspects and underscores the potential of lightweight systems in delivering interpretable and efficient solutions for AD.