CAR‑VLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action model for autonomous driving that jointly considers scene complexity and dynamic risk to determine reasoning depth, urgency, and focus. It maps four complexity‑risk categories to three reasoning modes—Fast Intuition, Slow Thinking, and Reflex Response—each tailored to different driving scenarios. The model is trained via progressive supervised learning and reinforcement learning, achieving competitive performance on NAVSIM and Navhard benchmarks and demonstrating risk‑aware reasoning in high‑risk scenarios.
By Xiaolei Chen, Zhuolin He, Yuxuan Liang, Xu Li, Haotian Chen, Fan Shi, Mengyang Zhao, Wenjuan Meng, Zisheng Chen, Zhihao Zhu, Zhounan Jin, Hengli Wang, Qingfan Wang, Jiamei Liang, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue
arXiv:2603. 18315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on manually engineered rewards or sparse collision signals, which fail to capture the rich contextual understanding required for safe driving and make unsafe exploration unavoidable in real-world settings.
By Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Zhengyang Wan, Yansong Qu, Junwei You, Sicong Jiang, Sikai Chen
Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) used in autonomous driving are evaluated on their ability to understand velocity through three tasks: surrounding‑agent speed, current ego speed, and short‑horizon future ego‑speed. Experiments on nuScenes show that while current ego speed can be accessed internally, verbal outputs are poor and surrounding‑agent speed is weakly encoded; temporal cues and frame order are largely ignored. Specialized driving models (Alpamayo‑1.5) improve latent speed representations but still leave gaps between internal knowledge and verbal readout, indicating that good planning outputs do not guarantee reliable dynamic state recovery.
By Katharina Winter, Stefan Englmeier, Fabian B. Flohr
arXiv:2610.31835v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Temporary traffic control redirects vehicles through work zones, requiring automated vehicles to connect an interpretation of the visible devices to a...
By Jiaxi Liu, Keshu Wu, Weizhe Tang, Bofeng Cao, Sikai Chen, Xiaopeng Li, Steven T. Parker, Bin Ran
arXiv:2607. 16938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models are now able to navigate complex road scenarios, mapping raw sensor observations directly to observed paths for open-loop evaluation and often effective driving in closed-loop evaluation.
By Kalpana Panda, Wesley Maia, Vinti Agarwal, Ross Greer
End-to-end autonomous driving models are now able to navigate complex road scenarios, mapping raw sensor observations directly to observed paths for open-loop evaluation and often effective driving in closed-loop evaluation. Yet the internal logic of these safety-critical systems remains largely opaque, due to the complexity of traffic scenes.
arXiv:2610.07946v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual disruptions can arise while a robot is executing a task, leaving a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to respond without knowing the disrupti...
By Ahin Lee, Jinwoo Seo, Youngsoo Jang, Taesik Gong
arXiv:2608. 01755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving (AD) increasingly utilize chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision to enhance the reasoning capabilities of their Vision-Language Model (VLM) components, yet existing annotation pipelines commonly expose the teacher model to the logged ground-truth (GT) future trajectory.
By Zixuan Huang, Yang Zhou, Kaixuan Wang, Guli Zhang, Hongyan Xie, Yakun Zhu, Hao Geng, Xiaozhi Chen, Yikun Ban, Deqing Wang
arXiv:2607. 16247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have empowered embodied agents to execute complex household tasks, they struggle to proactively handle dynamically emerging hazards during closed-loop interactions.
By Bingrui Sima, Lizhong Wang, Xiaoya Lu, Kun He, Xiao Yang
STRIDE (SpatioTemporal Reasoning In Driving Edge Cases) is a new benchmark designed to evaluate vision-language models on complex, safety-critical driving scenarios. It includes six task families—spatial perception, spatial understanding, temporal memory, temporal extrapolation, trajectory prediction, and scene-context awareness—using multiple-choice questions and free-form visual question answering that require detailed scene explanations and driving decision justifications. The benchmark focuses on unusual object behaviors and complex traffic interactions, and results show that even the best model, GPT‑6‑Astra, scores only 43.4% on average, highlighting significant gaps in spatiotemporal reasoning.
By Lieqi Liu, Rui gao, Jia-Chen Gu, Wenbo Hu, Zhaobin Mo, Ahmadreza Moradipari, Nejib Ammar, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng
The paper introduces TRUST, a token‑level reward model that predicts the correctness of partial chain‑of‑thought (CoT) traces in vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies, enabling monitoring and selective steering of reasoning. On driving and manipulation VLA benchmarks, TRUST improves reasoning accuracy and reduces collision rates and trajectory errors, though its impact on overall task performance varies across tasks. The study defines two evaluation axes—correctability and actionability—to assess when CoT can serve as a runtime safety interface.
By Sathwik Karnik, Joseph JR. Lee, Aryaman Gupta, Somil Bansal
arXiv:2606. 25127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how reward design shapes the internal attention patterns of reinforcement learning agents trained for autonomous driving.
By Mohamed Benabdelouahad, Ahmed Djalal Hacini, Nadir Farhi, Aissa Boulmerka