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.
arXiv:2606. 15099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action.
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: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...
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.
arXiv:2512. 05277v4 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.
The paper surveys the transition from textual chain-of-thought reasoning to action-grounded reasoning in autonomous driving, highlighting that driving decisions require continuous actions that mirror the spatiotemporal structure of the physical world. It reviews 171 papers, categorizing 130 methods into four main types—language-based, visual-spatial, latent-dynamic, and externalized reasoning—along with 13 subtypes linked to specific regions of interest. The authors argue that the future of driving agent reasoning lies in intermediate representations that are grounded in reality, linked to real-time actions, and verifiable within safety-critical systems.
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.
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.
arXiv:2603. 22281v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress in latent world models (e.
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: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...
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.