Mimir: Hierarchical Goal-Driven Diffusion with Uncertainty Propagation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

Mimir introduces a hierarchical goal-driven diffusion framework with uncertainty estimation and multi-rate guidance, significantly improving robustness and inference speed in end-to-end autonomous driving tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel hierarchical dual-system with goal uncertainty modeling and multi-rate guidance, advancing robustness and efficiency in autonomous driving.

Findings

20% improvement in driving score EPDMS

1.6 times faster high-level inference

Outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods

Abstract

End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a pivotal direction in the field of autonomous systems. Recent works have demonstrated impressive performance by incorporating high-level guidance signals to steer low-level trajectory planners. However, their potential is often constrained by inaccurate high-level guidance and the computational overhead of complex guidance modules. To address these limitations, we propose Mimir, a novel hierarchical dual-system framework capable of generating robust trajectories relying on goal points with uncertainty estimation: (1) Unlike previous approaches that deterministically model, we estimate goal point uncertainty with a Laplace distribution to enhance robustness; (2) To overcome the slow inference speed of the guidance system, we introduce a multi-rate guidance mechanism that predicts extended goal points in advance. Validated on challenging Navhard and Navtest benchmarks, Mimir surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods with a 20% improvement in the driving score EPDMS, while achieving 1.6 times improvement in high-level module inference speed without compromising accuracy. The code and models will be released soon to promote reproducibility and further development. The code is available at https://github.com/ZebinX/Mimir-Uncertainty-Driving