Beyond the Leaderboard: Counterfactual Diagnosis of End-to-End and VLA Driving Policies Under Domain Shift
End-to-end and vision-language-action (VLA) driving policies are compared by leaderboard rank, but a rank reports an outcome, not the behaviour behind it, so it predicts poorly how a policy will behave at a new site. On six released policies, rank on nuScenes open-loop error or on NAVSIM's leaderboard does not carry over to scenes with a pedestrian near the ego corridor at a new site. We propose a counterfactual check-up: a few hundred real frames, each edited two ways (pedestrian removed, or re-lit by a night-style perturbation), every edit verified by an independent detector, and the change in the planned trajectory read as a diagnosis rather than a score. From these edits two causal ax...
| Authors | Ruolin Yang, Zilin Huang, Buoyue Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 18 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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