Select2Drive: Pragmatic Communications for Real-Time Collaborative Autonomous Driving

Vehicle-to-everything communications-assisted autonomous driving has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, with pragmatic communications (PragComm) emerging as a promising paradigm for real-time collaboration among vehicles and other agents. Simultaneously, extensive research has explored the interplay between collaborative perception and decision-making in end-to-end driving frameworks. In this work, we revisit the collaborative driving problem and propose the Select2Drive framework to optimize the utilization of limited computational and communication resources. Particularly, to mitigate cumulative latency in perception and decision-making, Select2Drive introduces distributed predictive perception by formulating an active prediction paradigm and simplifying high-dimensional semantic feature prediction into a computationally efficient, motion-aware reconstruction. Given the “less is more” principle that an over-broadened perceptual horizon possibly confuses the decision module rather than contributing to it, Select2Drive utilizes area-of-importance-based PragComm to prioritize the communication of critical regions, thus boosting both communication efficiency and decision-making efficacy. Empirical evaluations on the V2Xverse and real-world DAIR-V2X datasets demonstrate that Select2Drive achieves a 2.60% and 1.99% improvement in offline perception tasks under limited bandwidth (resp., pose error conditions). Moreover, it delivers at most 8.35% and 2.65% enhancement in closed-loop driving scores and route completion rates, particularly in scenarios characterized by dense traffic and high-speed dynamics.