Poutine: Vision-Language-Trajectory Pre-Training and Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Enable Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving

We present Poutine, a 3B-parameter vision-language model (VLM) tailored for end-to-end autonomous driving in long-tail driving scenarios. Poutine is trained in two stages. To obtain strong base driving capabilities, we train Poutine-Base in a self-supervised vision-language-trajectory (VLT) next-token prediction fashion on 83 hours of CoVLA nominal driving and 11 hours of Waymo long-tail driving. Accompanying language annotations are auto-generated with a 72B-parameter VLM. Poutine is obtained by fine-tuning Poutine-Base with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using less than 500 preference-labeled frames from the Waymo validation set. We show that both VLT pretraining and RL fine-tuning are critical to attain strong driving performance in the long-tail. Poutine-Base achieves a rater-feedback score (RFS) of 8.12 on the validation set, nearly matching Waymo's expert ground-truth RFS. The final Poutine model achieves an RFS of 7.99 on the official Waymo test set, placing 1st in the 2025 Waymo Vision-Based End-to-End Driving Challenge by a significant margin. These results highlight the promise of scalable VLT pre-training and lightweight RL fine-tuning to enable robust and generalizable autonomy.

@article{rowe2025_2506.11234,
  title={ Poutine: Vision-Language-Trajectory Pre-Training and Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Enable Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving },
  author={ Luke Rowe and Rodrigue de Schaetzen and Roger Girgis and Christopher Pal and Liam Paull },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.11234},
  year={ 2025 }
}