YOUDrive: Driving Style as a Composable Direction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2610.14802 · cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO · Submitted 2026-10-10 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO

Submitted: 2026-10-10

Updated: 2026-10-10

Comments: 12 pages, including appendix

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: End-to-end driving policies can achieve strong task performance while offering limited control over their driving style.

Abstract

End-to-end driving policies can achieve strong task performance while offering limited control over their driving style. Driving style describes how a vehicle accelerates, brakes, and maintains distance. Policies trained without explicit preference conditioning lack a direct mechanism for adjusting these behaviors at inference. We propose YOUDrive, a vision--language--action planner for continuous and composable driving-style control. Each teacher's behavior is distilled into a task vector, a learned parameter update that induces a style direction in the planner's representation. These directions can be scaled and combined at inference without retraining the backbone. Conditioned on these directions, a flow-matching decoder models a multimodal trajectory distribution and generates kinematically feasible motion alternatives. We introduce the Style Alignment Score (SAS) to describe human-referenced kinematic behavior after safety and task gating. On NAVSIM navtest, a single coefficient monotonically controls assertiveness across six teacher-derived personas, while PDMS remains above 0.90 across the tested individual and blended configurations, reaching 0.954. Further analyses reveal systematic policy-specific kinematics after controlling for scene context, whereas the evaluated discrete style labels provide limited additional explanatory power. Code, checkpoints, and the metric will be released.

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