End-to-End Autonomous Driving: From Modular Decoders to VLA Architectures
Introduction The trajectory of autonomous driving architecture has undergone a paradigm shift: from the classical modular pipeline (perception →\to prediction →\to planning →\to control) toward end-to-end systems that map sensory inputs directly to driving actions. This transition is not merely an engineering convenience—it reflects a deep recognition that modular interfaces impose information bottlenecks and that joint optimization across the full stack can yield emergent capabilities invisible to individually optimized modules. The evolution can be broadly characterized in three phases: ...