OEL-AD: An Online Evolutive Learning Framework for Cross-Region Adaptive Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving models have achieved great progress in recent years, yet most existing approaches remain static, following a train-then-deploy paradigm that lacks the ability to adjust internal parameters when encountering new environments. This limitation is particularly critical in cross-region scenarios, which are common in real-world deployments in autonomous driving where differences in road layouts, traffic patterns, and environmental conditions introduce distribution shifts. In this paper, we argue for a paradigm shift towards Online Evolutive Learning (OEL), a learning paradigm designed to enable adaptive, online model optimization through the interaction and coordination of intelligent components in dynamic environments. We introduce OEL-AD, a novel framework that instantiates this paradigm for autonomous driving. Specifically, OEL-AD leverages trajectory uncertainty from the planning module to determine whether adaptive updates are necessary. When triggered, the framework uses discrepancies between predicted agent behaviors and subsequent observations as a self-supervised learning signal to refine perception and prediction modules, thereby indirectly improving planning accuracy and safety. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset with a cross-region split between Singapore and Boston demonstrate that OEL-AD consistently improves perception and prediction performance. This enhancement in perception and prediction consequently results in improved planning capabilities, thereby confirming the promise of online evolutive learning as a fundamental approach for building adaptive and robust autonomous driving systems.