HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Driving

TL;DR

HAD introduces a hierarchical diffusion planning framework with structured trajectory expansion and metric-decoupled RL, significantly improving end-to-end autonomous driving performance.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hierarchical diffusion policy, structure-preserved trajectory expansion, and metric-decoupled policy optimization for better autonomous driving.

Findings

Achieved +2.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM

Achieved +4.9 Route Completion on HUGSIM

Outperformed prior methods by a large margin

Abstract

End-to-end planning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for autonomous driving, where recent models often adopt a scoring-selection framework to choose trajectories from a large set of candidates, with diffusion-based decoding showing strong promise. However, directly selecting from the entire candidate space remains difficult to optimize, and Gaussian perturbations used in diffusion often introduce unrealistic trajectories that complicate the denoising process. In addition, for training these models, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise, but existing end-to-end RL approaches typically rely on a single coupled reward without structured signals, limiting optimization effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose HAD, an end-to-end planning framework with a Hierarchical Diffusion Policy that decomposes planning into a coarse-to-fine process. To improve trajectory generation, we introduce Structure-Preserved Trajectory Expansion, which produces realistic candidates while maintaining kinematic structure. For policy learning, we develop Metric-Decoupled Policy Optimization (MDPO) to enable structured RL optimization across multiple driving objectives. Extensive experiments show that HAD achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both NAVSIM and HUGSIM, outperforming prior arts by a huge margin: +2.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM and +4.9 Route Completion on HUGSIM.