PlanContext: Benchmarking In-Context Driving Decision-Making

Real-world driving requires context-aware decision-making. Existing end-to-end driving benchmarks primarily assess trajectory quality through safety, compliance, comfort, and driving progress, leaving context-dependent decision-making insufficiently characterized. To fill this gap, we present PlanContext, a benchmark for evaluating in-context driving decision-making. PlanContext constructs paired evaluations by varying high-level driving intentions while keeping the observed scene fixed, enabling a natural and controllable assessment of context-dependent decision-making. We further define six representative driving contexts and jointly evaluate contextual decision correctness, road compliance, and dynamic safety with class-balanced metrics. Experiments on 9,561 scene-condition instances from NAVSIM and 23 public end-to-end driving models show that high conventional driving-quality scores do not consistently correspond to strong route-level in-context driving decision-making. Further analysis shows that model behavior varies with decision timing, road structure, and traffic interaction depending on the decision required by the current context. Our results highlight in-context driving decision-making as an important complementary dimension for evaluating end-to-end driving systems.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-11-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2611.03067
Primary Topic
Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety
Type
preprint
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preprint

PlanContext: Benchmarking In-Context Driving Decision-Making

Yanhu Shan, Naiyu Gao, Yanhao Wu, Hao Shan et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
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PlanContext: Benchmarking In-Context Driving Decision-Making

Yanhu Shan, Naiyu Gao, Yanhao Wu, Hao Shan, Zhenning Li, Hongyang Li, Hao Zhao, Yilong Ren, Zhiyong Cui, Han Jiang, Rui Wu, Ruikai Li, Yizhe Fan, Haiyang Yu
preprint en

Abstract

Real-world driving requires context-aware decision-making. Existing end-to-end driving benchmarks primarily assess trajectory quality through safety, compliance, comfort, and driving progress, leaving context-dependent decision-making insufficiently characterized. To fill this gap, we present PlanContext, a benchmark for evaluating in-context driving decision-making. PlanContext constructs paired evaluations by varying high-level driving intentions while keeping the observed scene fixed, enabling a natural and controllable assessment of context-dependent decision-making. We further define six representative driving contexts and jointly evaluate contextual decision correctness, road compliance, and dynamic safety with class-balanced metrics. Experiments on 9,561 scene-condition instances from NAVSIM and 23 public end-to-end driving models show that high conventional driving-quality scores do not consistently correspond to strong route-level in-context driving decision-making. Further analysis shows that model behavior varies with decision timing, road structure, and traffic interaction depending on the decision required by the current context. Our results highlight in-context driving decision-making as an important complementary dimension for evaluating end-to-end driving systems.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety
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