The paper introduces DriveMind, a large-scale driving Visual Question Answering corpus that aligns chain-of-thought reasoning with trajectory planning. Experiments with Vision‑Language Model agents show a causal disconnect: removing navigation priors significantly harms planning, while removing the chain-of-thought has little effect. The authors propose the Reasoning‑Planning Decoupling Hypothesis and present a training‑free probe to assess an agent’s reliance on priors.
By Xurui Song, Shuo Huai, JingJing Jiang, Jiayi Kong, Jun Luo
arXiv:2609.38641v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have recently emerged as one of the prevailing solutions for autonomous driving, as they can utilize kno...
By Kai Yan, Xiangyu Chen, Yulong Cao, Alex Naumann, Peter Karkus, Yan Wang, Jef Packer, Alex Schwing, Yuxiong Wang, Boris Ivanovic, Wenjie Luo, Marco Pavone
arXiv:2608. 12854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics.
By Bing Zhan, Shuyao Shang, Jiahao Gu, Shuo Lu, Yuan Xu, Zhao Wang, Yida Wang, Xueyang Zhang, Kun Zhan, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
DriveWLA is a unified World‑Language‑Action model that integrates semantic understanding, future scene dynamics, and trajectory generation for autonomous driving. It employs a Mixture‑of‑Transformers architecture with three experts—World, Language, and Action—connected by Cross‑Expert Attention to align semantic and dynamic representations. After reinforcement learning refinement, DriveWLA outperforms existing VLM‑based and world‑model‑based planners on NAVSIM benchmarks and generalizes well to other datasets without fine‑tuning.
By Shuzheng Wang, Haoxuan Li, Shengzhen Li, Chenxi Wu, Yajing Sun, Lu Hou, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
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.
arXiv:2512. 05277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.
By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
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
Latent-CoT-Drive (LCDrive) is a vision‑language‑action model for autonomous driving that replaces natural‑language chain‑of‑thought reasoning with a latent language capturing possible outcomes of driving actions. The model interleaves action‑proposal tokens, aligned with the model’s output actions, and world‑model tokens grounded in a learned latent world model to reason about future outcomes. After a supervised cold‑start using ground‑truth future rollouts, LCDrive is further refined with closed‑loop reinforcement learning, achieving faster inference, higher‑quality trajectories, and greater gains from interactive RL than both non‑reasoning and text‑reasoning baselines on a large‑scale end‑to‑end driving benchmark.
By Shuhan Tan, Kashyap Chitta, Yuxiao Chen, Ran Tian, Yurong You, Yan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Yulong Cao, Philipp Krahenbuhl, Marco Pavone, Boris Ivanovic
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.
By Qi Liu, Yabei Li, Hongsong Wang, Heng Zhang, Lei He
arXiv:2609. 28366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to long-tail autonomous driving, but existing driving datasets provide limited supervision for connecting decision-critical visual evidence with reasoning and planning.
By Zhipeng Bao, Wenjie Zhao, Tianle Zhu, Haohua Que, Chence Yang, Geng Yuan, Qianwen Li
arXiv:2609.15169v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Driving vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly reason before acting, but their intermediate reasoning is often weakly grounded in physical sc...
By Xiao Liu, Haoyu Li, Jianghao Leng, Lin Wang, Chao Sun
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