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:2608. 12854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics.
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:2607. 08375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving.
arXiv:2606. 29879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide powerful semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) planning.
arXiv:2605.10426v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing reasoning mecha...
WALT introduces a method to align latent trajectories with pretrained driving world models, creating a compact generative trajectory space that preserves action-relevant semantics without altering the original model. The approach uses a dual-branch autoencoder to map raw waypoints into this latent space and transfers visual world knowledge into trajectory representations. Experiments on NAVSIM benchmarks show modest performance gains and a 30.5% reduction in planner FLOPs, indicating that maintaining world representations while extracting action-relevant information can improve trajectory planning efficiency.
arXiv:2606.27504v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) unify future environment prediction with action generation for autonomous driving, yet existing approaches optimize only...
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.
The paper introduces LaPla, a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that uses a latent‑aligned planning approach to convert discrete semantic reasoning into continuous, physics‑constrained driving actions. It employs a residual VQ‑VAE to encode vehicle kinematics into a structured latent space, then projects multimodal inputs—images, past actions, and text—directly into this latent space, allowing a frozen decoder to generate physically plausible trajectories without quantization errors. Experiments on nuScenes and NVIDIA AlpaSim show LaPla reduces long‑horizon L2 error by 15.52% and improves closed‑loop success rates by 33.34 percentage points while cutting inference latency.
arXiv:2606. 06219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models often struggle to balance multi-modal maneuver generation with real-time inference constraints.
SimWAM is a lightweight World-Action Model that uses future‑video prediction only during training to supervise an action expert, enabling end‑to‑end autonomous driving without costly test‑time future imagination. The architecture co‑trains a pretrained video expert and a lightweight action expert via joint flow matching, while an isolated attention mask keeps action prediction independent of future frames. This design allows the video backbone to be swapped and the action expert scaled independently, achieving 91.5 PDMS on NAVSIM, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art WAM planners with lower latency and zero‑shot transfer to nuScenes.
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.