Don't Shake the Wheel: Momentum-Aware Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving frameworks enable seamless integration of perception and planning but often rely on one-shot trajectory prediction, which may lead to unstable control and vulnerability to occlusions in single-frame perception. To address this, we propose the Momentum-Aware Driving (MomAD) framework, which introduces trajectory momentum and perception momentum to stabilize and refine trajectory predictions. MomAD comprises two core components: (1) Topological Trajectory Matching (TTM) employs Hausdorff Distance to select the optimal planning query that aligns with prior paths to ensure coherence;(2) Momentum Planning Interactor (MPI) cross-attends the selected planning query with historical queries to expand static and dynamic perception files. This enriched query, in turn, helps regenerate long-horizon trajectory and reduce collision risks. To mitigate noise arising from dynamic environments and detection errors, we introduce robust instance denoising during training, enabling the planning model to focus on critical signals and improve its robustness. We also propose a novel Trajectory Prediction Consistency (TPC) metric to quantitatively assess planning stability. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that MomAD achieves superior long-term consistency (>=3s) compared to SOTA methods. Moreover, evaluations on the curated Turning-nuScenes shows that MomAD reduces the collision rate by 26% and improves TPC by 0.97m (33.45%) over a 6s prediction horizon, while closedloop on Bench2Drive demonstrates an up to 16.3% improvement in success rate.