TerraTransfer++: Demonstration-Free End-to-End Planner

Zikang Xiong, Weixin Li, Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Saarth Bonde +4

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and real-world deployments. Its standard training recipe, however, is expensive across all existing paradigms: imitation learning requires fleet-scale driving logs whose behavior distribution only thinly covers the safety-critical tail; closed-loop reinforcement learning in a photorealistic simulator, while offering diverse behaviors, is bottlenecked by sample-efficiency, per-step cost of rendering, and a forward pass through a large vision backbone. Self-play in vectorized simulators changes the economics: at millions of rollout steps per second, one can obtain a state distribution with natural diversity in collisions, near-misses, and recoveries that no driving log contains, and a highly reactive policy emerges from a basic driving-quality reward. Our approach exploits this asymmetry. We pretrain a single policy by self-play, distill its rollouts into a flow-matching trajectory teacher that also plans, and train lightweight adapters on a frozen pretrained vision backbone to reproduce the latent space of either teacher through the action KL divergence, a batch-relational low-rank structural…