Poutine: Vision-Language-Trajectory Pre-Training and Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Enable Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving
About
Maintaining good driving behavior in out-of-distribution scenarios remains a critical challenge in autonomous driving. A promising direction is to leverage the generalist knowledge and reasoning capabilities of large-language models by treating unusual driving scenarios as a logical reasoning task. In this work, we present Poutine, a method that uses an off-the-shelf 3B-parameter vision-language model (VLM) - without any additional components - to achieve robust end-to-end autonomous driving via a simple and scalable training recipe. To learn strong base driving capabilities, we first train Poutine-Base using self-supervised next-token prediction over vision, language, and trajectory (VLT) tokens, leveraging both nominal and long-tail driving data. In the second stage, we fine-tune Poutine-Base using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a small set of human preference-labeled examples. We evaluated our approach on the Waymo end-to-end driving benchmark curated for long-tail scenarios. The final Poutine model achieves an RFS of 7.99 on the test set, placing 1st in the 2025 Waymo Vision-Based End-to-End Driving Challenge by a significant margin. Our results suggest that handcrafted tokenizers or custom architectural components added to base VLMs in prior work are not necessary to achieve strong driving performance. Instead, this work highlights the potential of scalable VLT pretraining combined with lightweight RL fine-tuning to enable robust and generalizable autonomous driving.