SlackDrive is a pre‑inference compute allocator that dynamically selects the compute budget for each driving control step by reusing the realized latency from previous inferences. By profiling a small set of discrete budgets once, it estimates the current compute state online and chooses the highest‑utility budget that stays within the admissible latency envelope. On the NAVSIM v2 benchmark with DriveDreamer‑Policy, SlackDrive boosts latency‑constrained EPDMS performance by 21.7% compared to the best baseline, while full‑budget and token‑pruning approaches exceed the latency limits under runtime contention.
By Xiaohuan Pei, Hengguang Zhou, Yuanhao Ban, Justin Cui, Jiaqi Feng, Haoyu Xie, Tao Huang, Pichao Wang, Yanchao Yang, Cho-Jui Hsieh
arXiv:2608. 14586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are becoming a promising paradigm for autonomous driving, but their deployment on existing vehicle platforms remains difficult because they introduce both high inference latency and strong GPU-side resource pressure.
By Haibo HU, Lianming Huang, Qiao Li, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
The deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in autonomous driving (AD) systems is constrained by on-board computing power, restricting vehicles to small VLMs (SVLMs) with limited perception and reasoning capabilities. Infrastructure-assisted AD alleviates this resource constraint by enabling collaboration with large VLMs (LVLMs) at edge servers.
The paper introduces Endpoint-Constrained Optimization (ECO), a lightweight postprocessing layer that corrects intermediate waypoints of end-to-end driving policies while preserving the predicted endpoint. ECO does not require maps, privileged simulator state, or additional training, and can be applied to a wide range of waypoint-emitting policies. Experiments on two closed-loop simulators show that ECO significantly improves closed-loop performance, achieving top results in the HUGSIM Closed-Loop Driving Challenge and boosting scene scores on AlpaSim.
By Brayden Zhang, Mahsa Golchoubian, Igor Gilitschenski, Boris Ivanovic, Kashyap Chitta
arXiv:2606. 07464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolithic vision-action models represent an emerging paradigm in autonomous driving.
By Zhixuan Liang, Yuxiao Chen, Yurong You, Peter Karkus, Wenhao Ding, Boyi Li, Alexander Popov, Yan Wang, Maximilian Igl, Yiming Li, Danfei Xu, Nikolai Smolyanskiy, Boris Ivanovic, Ping Luo, Marco Pavone
arXiv:2607. 04179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show immense potential in autonomous driving.
By Zhaohong Liu, Hao Ye, Xianlin Zhang, Mengshi Qi
arXiv:2608. 15502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising foundation for Embodied AI, but their high inference cost poses significant challenges for deployment in robotic systems.
By Ao Zhou, Bo Dai, Le Yu, Xingyu Liu, Zeyu Hao, Lingkun Long, Chunming Hu, Jianlei Yang
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.
By Shihao Ji, HongXi Li, Zihui Song, Mingyu Li
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise to bring end-to-end reasoning to autonomous driving, but their computational cost remains far too high for real-time control. The core challenge is structural: VLA inference is not a single bottleneck but a cascade of four.
The paper introduces a MeanField surrogate model for predicting performance of concurrent heterogeneous AI inference workloads on shared GPUs, reducing profiling complexity from combinatorial to linear in the number of models. Experiments with up to six models show high accuracy (R²≈0.96) and efficient integration into a genetic algorithm scheduler, achieving near-exhaustive search performance with minimal runtime overhead.
By Youssef Ennouri, Soonhoi Ha
arXiv:2608. 12932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise to bring end-to-end reasoning to autonomous driving, but their computational cost remains far too high for real-time control.
By Zekai Li, Yihao Liang, Hongfei Zhang, Jian Chen, Yesheng Liang, Zhijian Liu
arXiv:2606. 27743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) inference is typically deployed under a static resource assumption, where models execute a fixed computational graph regardless of the runtime environment.
By Yuhang Chen, Jinhao Duan, Ruichen Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Xiaohan Wei, Yunchen Pu, Fei Tian, Chonglin Sun, Parish Aggarwal, Frank Shyu, Luke Simon, Sandeep Pandey, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu