From Proxy Learning to Driving Decisions: A Transfer-Based Framework for Evaluating Future-Aware Autonomous Driving Planners

Abstract: Future-aware representations and world models are increasingly used in proposal-based autonomous-driving planners to improve trajectory selection. However, improvements in proxy objectives or restricted subsets are often interpreted as planning gains without verifying proposal ordering, selected trajectories, full-scale utility, and critical driving components. We propose the Proxy-to-Decision Transfer (PDT) Framework, an analysis framework that evaluates when learned future information supports a reliable driving-performance improvement claim. Its Decision-Transfer Decomposition Module localizes value loss through score margins, switch-conditioned utility, and support-versus-selection regret. Its Reliability-Constrained Validation Module requires exact pairing, a minimum meaningful effect, scale-expanded confirmation, safety non-compensation, sequential comparability, and family-level robustness. On a representative future-aware planner evaluated with NAVSIM-v1, component BCE decreases from 0.705 to 0.530 while held selected PDM decreases from 0.963 to 0.961. A separate candidate improves a 512-record prefix by 0.00909, with a scene-bootstrap 95% interval of [0.000744, 0.0177], but its 2048-record and complete-support intervals include zero. A proposal-level replay further confirms the switch-utility decomposition, yet none of 432 screened configurations passes the two-half, two-seed robustness gate. PDT therefore identifies where decision transfer fails or remains indeterminate across proxy, subset, aggregate, and selection evidence.