The paper introduces TRUST, a token‑level reward model that predicts the correctness of partial chain‑of‑thought (CoT) traces in vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies, enabling monitoring and selective steering of reasoning. On driving and manipulation VLA benchmarks, TRUST improves reasoning accuracy and reduces collision rates and trajectory errors, though its impact on overall task performance varies across tasks. The study defines two evaluation axes—correctability and actionability—to assess when CoT can serve as a runtime safety interface.
By Sathwik Karnik, Joseph JR. Lee, Aryaman Gupta, Somil Bansal
arXiv:2606. 23938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driving VLA models incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning are attractive because they leverage pretrained VLM representations and expose intermediate decisions in natural language, yet current rationales often lack the step-by-step decision semantics needed to keep the rationale causally connected to the planned motion.
By Xiangbo Gao, Xiukun Huang, Boyu Lu, Junge Zhang, Mengjie Mao, Jiachen Li, Wei Xiong, Zhengzhong Tu
The paper introduces a compute‑aware three‑action controller for evaluator‑guided reasoning, deciding whether to trust the current answer, fallback, or expand inference. It scores terminal actions by predicted success and uses a rollout‑based surrogate for expansion, explicitly pricing compute cost. Experiments on width expansion and revision tasks show the controller improves utility over fixed policies while reducing online compute by about 30% and 16%, respectively, and demonstrates that evaluator‑guided reasoning is best viewed as resource allocation under uncertainty.
By Weida Liang, Kenji Kawaguchi
The paper introduces CARE, a method for certifying accelerated inference in vision‑language‑action models. CARE uses paired rollouts on a calibration set to guarantee that the risk of acceleration‑induced failure stays below a user‑specified budget, selecting the fastest certified accelerator or falling back to the reference policy. Experiments on LIBERO suites show that CARE achieves 9.0–10.8× speedups while preserving at least 85.8% of reference‑solved episodes with 95% confidence, and it outperforms non‑guaranteed selectors in both budget adherence and rollout efficiency.
By Rui Liu, Tong Zheng, Jindong Gu, Zhipeng Wang
arXiv:2610.31835v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Temporary traffic control redirects vehicles through work zones, requiring automated vehicles to connect an interpretation of the visible devices to a...
By Jiaxi Liu, Keshu Wu, Weizhe Tang, Bofeng Cao, Sikai Chen, Xiaopeng Li, Steven T. Parker, Bin Ran
arXiv:2610.17540v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Textual reasoning before acting has improved vision-language-action (VLA) models, but at the cost of latency: every action conditioned on the reasoning...
By Jack Lu, Yurong You, Boyi Li, Yulong Cao, Thomas Tian, Chaowei Xiao, Xiangyu Chen, Wenjie Luo, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Yan Wang
arXiv:2607. 11506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) optimizes LLMs using sparse verifiable final-answer rewards.
By Xiaojian Liu, Han Xu, Jianqiang Xia, Zhixuan Li, Ke Xu, Yiwei Dai, Xinran Chen, Changwo Wu, Yuchen Li
arXiv:2608. 06154v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as zero-shot controllers, but successful trajectories do not necessarily show that decisions are grounded in visual input: simulator dynamics and conservative action priors can produce favourable scores without meaningful perception.
By J. de Curt\`o, Dayani Plasencia, Diego S\'anchez, I. de Zarz\`a
While vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly, running them at every control step remains expensive. Prior work accelerates VLA inference using techniques like action chunking and vi...
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
arXiv:2610.18614v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Controlling an acting LLM agent means deciding, at each step of a long-horizon task, whether to trust its next action, abstain, or hand off to a human....
By Ashutosh Hathidara
arXiv:2607. 15621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models bring instruction following and scene reasoning to end-to-end driving, but their inference latency collides with the control rate a vehicle requires.
By Yun Li, Jiachen Gong, Simon Thompson, Ehsan Javanmardi, Qunli Zhang, Zifan Zeng, Shiming Liu, Peng Wang, Zixuan Guo, Manabu Tsukada