End-to-End Learning vs. Modular Architectures: Comparative Insights into Autonomous Driving Systems

Title:End-to-End Learning vs. Modular Architectures: Comparative Insights into Autonomous Driving Systems

Abstract:Autonomous driving systems have become a central focus of intelligent transportation research, with End-to-End Learning and Modular Architectures offering two prominent design paradigms for their implementation. E2E Learning uses deep learning algorithms to map raw sensory inputs directly to driving actuators, providing a streamlined and adaptable solution. while Modular Architectures employ a pipeline-based approach, dividing the system into distinct subsystems for perception, cognition, planning, and control. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of these paradigms, focusing on their strengths, limitations, and trade-offs to provide insights into their suitability for various autonomous driving applications. The study evaluates key factors such as interpretability, scalability, robustness, and real-world applicability. While End-to-End Learning emphasizes simplicity and adaptability in dynamic environments, it lacks transparency and is highly dependent on large datasets. Conversely, Modular Architectures offer superior interpretability and task-specific optimization, but face challenges related to integration complexity and scalability. To address these limitations, hybrid approaches that combine the strengths of both paradigms have emerged, offering a promising direction for overcoming these challenges. Beyond this comparative synthesis, following work proposes a Four-Dimensional Architecture Selection Framework, comprising twelve binary criteria across safety, operating environment, data/computational resources, and deployment context, and validate it against ten published autonomous driving systems, correctly recommending 7/10 deployed architectures. This work synthesizes existing literature to highlight key trade-offs between the paradigms and identifies hybrid architectures as a promising direction for future research.

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.01746 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.01746v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.01746 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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