arXiv:2606. 29879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide powerful semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) planning.
arXiv:2607. 03182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving planning requires translating navigation intent, traffic rules, dynamic interactions, and language instructions into executable continuous trajectories.
The paper introduces LaPla, a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that uses a latent‑aligned planning approach to convert discrete semantic reasoning into continuous, physics‑constrained driving actions. It employs a residual VQ‑VAE to encode vehicle kinematics into a structured latent space, then projects multimodal inputs—images, past actions, and text—directly into this latent space, allowing a frozen decoder to generate physically plausible trajectories without quantization errors. Experiments on nuScenes and NVIDIA AlpaSim show LaPla reduces long‑horizon L2 error by 15.52% and improves closed‑loop success rates by 33.34 percentage points while cutting inference latency.
ForeDrive introduces a planning-relevant latent world model that is asymmetrically coupled to a Diffusion Transformer planner. The model learns multi‑horizon latent futures with a JEPA‑style world model, while planning gradients update the shared encoder and stop‑gradient routing trains the predictor with forecasting losses only. Gated visual fusion, future‑status injection, and Trajectory‑Adaptive Bias are used to guide trajectory generation without overriding current observations, achieving high performance on NAVSIM benchmarks using only front‑view images and pure imitation learning.
arXiv:2606. 06219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models often struggle to balance multi-modal maneuver generation with real-time inference constraints.
WALT introduces a method to align latent trajectories with pretrained driving world models, creating a compact generative trajectory space that preserves action-relevant semantics without altering the original model. The approach uses a dual-branch autoencoder to map raw waypoints into this latent space and transfers visual world knowledge into trajectory representations. Experiments on NAVSIM benchmarks show modest performance gains and a 30.5% reduction in planner FLOPs, indicating that maintaining world representations while extracting action-relevant information can improve trajectory planning efficiency.
Efficient Multi-Modal Planning with Reward-Guided Preference Optimization for Autonomous Driving proposes EMPlan, a hybrid trajectory planning method that combines sparse anchors with an offset refinement module for low-latency, high-accuracy predictions. The approach uses a two-stage training paradigm—pretraining followed by reward-guided fine-tuning—to improve safety without extra inference cost, leveraging rule-based reward signals and unpaired preference supervision. EMPlan is evaluated on the non-reactive NAVSIM benchmark, achieving a favorable balance between planning accuracy and efficiency under real-time constraints.
arXiv:2606. 28758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting future states is essential for autonomous agents, yet current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models fundamentally lack this capability, relying instead on reactive perception-action mapping.
arXiv:2606. 20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories.
arXiv:2606. 07244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires agents to follow natural-language instructions while navigating in real-world-like environments.
arXiv:2606. 07464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolithic vision-action models represent an emerging paradigm in autonomous driving.
Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics. Existing end-to-end driving approaches, however, typically emphasize only one side of this requirement: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exploit VLM priors for semantic reasoning, while World Action Models (WAMs) provide future-aware prediction through generative world modeling.