FlowDrive: Energy Flow Field for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

1Shanghai Jiao Tong University 2Bosch Corporate Research, Shanghai, China 3AIR, Tsinghua University 4Shanghai University
Corresponding Author

Visualizations

Open-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance

Lane-change Scenarios on Navsim test split

Open-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance

Cut-in Scenarios on Navsim test split

Close-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance

Yield Scenarios on Navsim test split

Open-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance
Close-Loop planning performance

Nudge Scenarios on Navsim test split

FlowDrive Model Architecture

FlowDrive Model Architecture

Abstract

Recent advances in end-to-end autonomous driving leverage multi-view images to construct BEV representations for motion planning. In motion planning, autonomous vehicles need considering both hard constraints imposed by geometrically occupied obstacles (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians) and soft, rule-based semantics with no explicit geometry (e.g., lane boundaries, traffic priors). However, existing end-to-end frameworks typically rely on BEV features learned in an implicit manner, lacking explicit modeling of risk and guidance priors for safe and interpretable planning. To address this, we propose \textbf{FlowDrive}, a novel framework that introduces physically interpretable energy-based flow fields—including risk potential and lane attraction fields—to encode semantic priors and safety cues into the BEV space. These flow-aware features enable adaptive refinement of anchor trajectories and serve as interpretable guidance for trajectory generation. Moreover, FlowDrive decouples motion intent prediction from trajectory denoising via a conditional diffusion planner with feature-level gating, alleviating task interference and enhancing multimodal diversity. Experiments on the NAVSIM v2 benchmark demonstrate that FlowDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance with an EPDMS of 86.3, surpassing prior baselines in both safety and planning quality.

Experimental Results

Open-Loop planning performance