1st Workshop on
Generalization in Autonomous Driving: Paradigms, Practice, and Public Road Demonstrations

Autonomous driving has made remarkable progress in recent years. Nevertheless, one unsolved question remains: How can autonomous vehicle (AV) systems generalize to new environments or unseen conditions?
This question can be answered from different angles: (1) Use machine learning-based software architectures, (2) use more data, (3) apply heavy simulation & real-world testing or (4) making code open-source available for joint community development. This workshop will go beyond abstract discussions by confronting participants with the real challenges of generalization in autonomous driving. We will stage a direct dialogue between two competing paradigms: (1) modular, open-source ecosystems that thrive on community-driven collaboration, and (2) data-hungry end-to-end approaches that aim to scale through massive models and datasets. What makes this workshop unique is its hands-on character: participants will experience a live, livestreamed demonstration of the TUM EDGAR autonomous vehicle driving on public roads in Munich, providing a concrete basis for in-depth discussions on robustness, safety, and scalability. Through keynotes, interactive sessions, and real-world experiments on topics like domain adaptation, sim-to-real transfer, self-supervised and continual learning, evaluation benchmarks, and software engineering practices, we will collectively ask: which paradigm — modular, end-to-end, or hybrid — can truly deliver generalization in AVs?

The workshop will feature prominent speakers, and contributions from the intelligent vehicles and mobile robotics community.
The workshop is happening in-person at ICRA 2026 in Vienna. Additionally we welcome participants to listen and contribute virtually via Zoom.

We invite papers for submission to the workshop related to the topics descripted above and the theme of autonomous racing. Position papers, work in progress and novel but not necessarily thoroughly worked out ideas are encouraged. The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop’s program committee and will undergo a thorough review process and receive 2-3 high quality reviews. In addition, a best paper award will be presented in both categories.

Workshop Paper Style: 4-6 pages, including references. The paper should be in PDF format and use the standard IEEE ICRA Conference template. Accepted paper will be made available on the website and the authors are invited to make an additionl oral (live) presentations, or a video highlight.

Paper Submission: Open until April 15. Feedback is scheduled for May 15.
Submit your paper via the OpenReview submission platform