arXiv AI

NoRD: A Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model that Drives without Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 21172v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are advancing autonomous driving by replacing modular pipelines with unified end-to-end architectures.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Less Language, More Latents: Annotation-Efficient VLAs for Driving

The paper introduces Latent Action Driving Annotations (LADA), a three‑stage pipeline that converts large amounts of unlabelled observation‑trajectory data into a language‑conditioned driving model. First, a latent action model with a vector‑quantised bottleneck learns a compact codebook of vehicle intents. Then, a small set of language‑annotated examples trains a vision‑language translator to map observations and instructions into this codebook, and finally a VLA is trained on observation‑latent‑action pairs across the full corpus. Using less than 5% of language annotations, LADA attains a Driving Score of 87.98 and a Success Rate of 70.46% on Bench2Drive, matching or surpassing fully supervised baselines.

By Alexey Zakharov, Kemal Oksuz, Puneet K. Dokania
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Towards Zero-Shot Transfer Across Embodiments For Driving VLAs

The paper investigates how Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models can generalise across different driving environments and camera setups. It introduces a multi‑dataset training strategy and an auxiliary objective called BEV‑Forcing, which injects bird‑eye‑view spatial information into the VLA backbone to improve both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution performance on a limited number of camera rigs. The authors observe that while BEV‑Forcing helps when training data is scarce, its advantage diminishes as the number of training embodiments grows, suggesting that scaling diversity may reduce the impact of such auxiliary tasks.

By Caio Azevedo, Stefano Sabatini, Sascha Hornauer, Fabien Moutarde
arXiv AI
Aug 11

CMU-Drive and V2V-VLA: Cooperative Multi-agent Unified Driving with Reasoning Benchmark and Vehicle-to-Vehicle Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2608. 07621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved impressive performance for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches are primarily designed for an individual single autonomous driving agent with limited support for cooperative perception, reasoning, and planning.

By Hsu-kuang Chiu, Stephen F. Smith