Papers › NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

9 Sep 2021ICCV 2021 10arXiv:2109.04456archive 2025-07-28

Kashyap Chitta, Aditya Prakash, Andreas Geiger

Efficient reasoning about the semantic, spatial, and temporal structure of a scene is a crucial prerequisite for autonomous driving. We present NEural ATtention fields (NEAT), a novel representation that enables such reasoning for end-to-end imitation learning models. NEAT is a continuous function which maps locations in Bird's Eye View (BEV) scene coordinates to waypoints and semantics, using intermediate attention maps to iteratively compress high-dimensional 2D image features into a compact representation. This allows our model to selectively attend to relevant regions in the input while ignoring information irrelevant to the driving task, effectively associating the images with the BEV representation. In a new evaluation setting involving adverse environmental conditions and challenging scenarios, NEAT outperforms several strong baselines and achieves driving scores on par with the privileged CARLA expert used to generate its training data. Furthermore, visualizing the attention maps for models with NEAT intermediate representations provides improved interpretability.

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Encoder autonomousvision/neat/neat/architectures/encoder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · f03a0d1e4f3c29b0 · report
ImageCNN autonomousvision/neat/neat/architectures/encoder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 1a6e75ebc48fec81 · report

Tasks

Autonomous DrivingCARLA longest6Imitation LearningNovel View Synthesis

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Autonomous Driving CARLA Leaderboard NEAT Driving Score 21.83 #15 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Autonomous Driving CARLA Leaderboard NEAT Infraction penalty 0.65 #15 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Autonomous Driving CARLA Leaderboard NEAT Route Completion 41.71 #15 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA longest6 CARLA Neural Attention Fields (NEAT) Driving Score 24 #19 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA longest6 CARLA Neural Attention Fields (NEAT) Infraction Score 0.71 #19 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA longest6 CARLA Neural Attention Fields (NEAT) Route Completion 62 #19 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Novel View Synthesis X3D NeAT PSNR 36.01 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Novel View Synthesis X3D NeAT SSIM 0.9638 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CARLAEntropy RegularizationNEATPPO

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