用轻量级对齐保持感知更新后决策性能稳定
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Preserving Policy Compatibility Under Perception Updates in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

- 通过线性与卷积缝合器实现感知与决策的潜在空间对齐
- 跨域场景下保留91%以上驾驶得分,适配时间从22.18小时降至0.91小时
- 适合需快速迭代感知模型的自动驾驶系统开发者
端到端自动驾驶系统通过潜在表示紧密耦合感知与决策。因此,感知模型更新会改变这些表示,导致固定下游策略性能下降。现有方法多依赖策略重训练或结构解耦,计算与验证成本高昂。本文提出端到端自动驾驶中的模型缝合问题,验证了通过轻量级潜在空间对齐可维持策略兼容性的假设。研究了低复杂度缝合方法,包括线性和卷积缝合器,用于恢复更新后的感知模块与冻结决策模块间的兼容性。实验表明,缝合有效保留了多种感知更新下的下游驾驶行为,包括随机初始化、传感器配置和训练域变化。在从nuScenes到CARLA的最挑战跨域设置中,卷积缝合保留了超过91%的无迁移驾驶得分,适配时间由22.18小时减少至0.91小时。结果表明,模型缝合为维护端到端自动驾驶系统提供了一种高效且计算成本低的替代方案。代码将在论文录用后开源,网址:https://github.com/SCP-CN-001/model-stitching。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
End-to-end autonomous driving systems tightly couple perception and decision-making through latent representations. Consequently, updates to perception models can alter these representations and degrade the performance of downstream policies that remain fixed. Existing solutions typically rely on policy retraining or architectural decoupling, both of which incur substantial computation and validation costs. In this paper, we formulate the model stitching problem for end-to-end autonomous driving and test the hypothesis that policy compatibility can be preserved through lightweight latent-space alignment. We study low-complexity model stitching methods, including linear and convolutional stitchers, for restoring compatibility between updated perception modules and frozen downstream policy modules. Experiments demonstrate that stitching effectively preserves downstream driving behavior under diverse perception updates, including changes in random initialization, sensor configuration, and training domain. In the most challenging cross-domain setting from nuScenes to CARLA, convolutional stitching retains over 91\% of the no-shift driving score while reducing adaptation time from \SI{22.18}{h} to \SI{0.91}{h}. These results suggest that model stitching provides an effective and computationally efficient alternative to retraining or fine-tuning for maintaining end-to-end autonomous driving systems. The model will be open-sourced upon paper acceptance at https://github.com/SCP-CN-001/model-stitching to support further research and development in autonomous driving.
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