ZTRS: Zero-Imitation End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Trajectory Scoring

TL;DR

ZTRS is a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework that eliminates imitation learning by exclusively using reinforcement learning on raw sensor data, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

ZTRS introduces the first framework to replace imitation learning entirely with reward-based reinforcement learning on high-dimensional sensor inputs for autonomous driving.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art on Navhard benchmark.

Outperforms imitation learning baselines on HUGSIM.

Demonstrates strong performance in real-world and synthetic scenarios.

Abstract

End-to-end autonomous driving maps raw sensor inputs directly into ego-vehicle trajectories to avoid cascading errors from perception modules and to leverage rich semantic cues. Existing frameworks largely rely on Imitation Learning (IL), which can be limited by sub-optimal expert demonstrations and covariate shift during deployment. On the other hand, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently shown potential in scaling up with simulations, but is typically confined to low-dimensional symbolic inputs (e.g. 3D objects and maps), falling short of full end-to-end learning from raw sensor data. We introduce ZTRS (Zero-Imitation End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Trajectory Scoring), a framework that combines the strengths of both worlds: sensor inputs without losing information and RL training for robust planning. To the best of our knowledge, ZTRS is the first framework that eliminates IL entirely by only learning from rewards while operating directly on high-dimensional sensor data. ZTRS utilizes offline reinforcement learning with our proposed Exhaustive Policy Optimization (EPO), a variant of policy gradient tailored for enumerable actions and rewards. ZTRS demonstrates strong performance across three benchmarks: Navtest (generic real-world open-loop planning), Navhard (open-loop planning in challenging real-world and synthetic scenarios), and HUGSIM (simulated closed-loop driving). Specifically, ZTRS achieves the state-of-the-art result on Navhard and outperforms IL-based baselines on HUGSIM. Code will be available at https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/ZTRS.