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:2610.07521v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Driving models increasingly ground reasoning in causal relations, spatial structure, perceptual evidence, and predicted futures. These advances make re...
By Minkyoung Cho, Zewei Zhou, Wenhao Ding, Shuhan Tan, Boyi Li, Yuxiao Chen, Yan Wang, Zheng Lian, Min-Hung Chen, Chaowei Xiao, Zhuoqing Mao, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Yulong Cao
The paper introduces the KITScenes LongTail dataset, a curated collection of rare driving scenarios designed to evaluate how well reasoning models in autonomous driving follow their own reasoning. The authors find that many current models frequently diverge between the actions they state in their reasoning chains and the actions they actually execute, a phenomenon they term incoherence. They show that when the reasoning and execution disagree, the reasoning is often correct, and enforcing coherence via a kinematic model can improve motion planning, indicating that coherent action based on stated reasoning is essential for trustworthy autonomous driving.
By Royden Wagner, Omer Sahin Tas, Jaime Villa, Felix Hauser, Yinzhe Shen, Marlon Steiner, Dominik Strutz, Carlos Fernandez, Quentin Delfosse, Christoph Weinhuber, Christian Kinzig, Guillermo S. Gutierrez-Cabello, Hendrik K\"onigshof, Fabian Immel, Richard Schwarzkopf, Nils Alexander Rack, Kevin R\"osch, Kaiwen Wang, Jan-Hendrik Pauls, Martin Lauer, Igor Gilitschenski, Holger Caesar, Christoph Stiller
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
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...
By Minqing Huang, Yujiao Xiang, Zihan Liang, Jiajie Huang, Jingqi Wang, Yuheng Zhou, Zhi Xu, Feiyang Tan, Hangning Zhou, Mu Yang, Gong Che
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
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:2607. 08375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving.
By Xuerun Yan, Zhexi Lian, Nuoheng Zhang, Shiyu Fang, Haoran Wang, Chen Lv, Jia Hu, Binyang Song
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:2511.20022v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong understanding of driving scenes, drawing interest in their...
By Seungjun Yu, Seonho Lee, Namho Kim, Jaeyo Shin, Junsung Park, Wonjeong Ryu, Raehyuk Jung, Hyunjung Shim
arXiv:2610.10390v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language-action~(VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving. However, existing VLA models still suffer from a funda...
By Xingtai Gui, Yucheng Zhou, Dongqian Guo, Jiahao Gong, Feiyang Tan, Jianbing Shen
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.
By Bohao Zhao, Chengrui Wei, Guangfeng Jiang, Ruixin Liu, Xuejie Lv, Liu Liang, Sutao Deng, Xiuyang Fan, Pengkun Zheng, Jinyun Zhou, Rui Guo, Hanpeng Liu, Yutong Zheng, Yi Guo, Xinlong Zheng, Qingyu Luo, Zhuangzhuang Ding, Yu Zhang, Hang Zhang, Xianming Liu