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.
By Mingkai Jia, Jiaxin Guo, Zhijian Shu, Jiawei Xu, Mingxiao Li, Jintao Cheng, Ping Tan, Wei Yin
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.
By Ruoyu Yao, Yusen Xie, Qingzhao Liu, Pei Liu, Zewei Yang, Yipeng Zhu, Xiaolong Wang, Jun Ma
arXiv:2606. 07464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolithic vision-action models represent an emerging paradigm in autonomous driving.
By Zhixuan Liang, Yuxiao Chen, Yurong You, Peter Karkus, Wenhao Ding, Boyi Li, Alexander Popov, Yan Wang, Maximilian Igl, Yiming Li, Danfei Xu, Nikolai Smolyanskiy, Boris Ivanovic, Ping Luo, Marco Pavone
arXiv:2606. 08657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based visuomotor policies operating directly in raw action spaces conflate scene comprehension with trajectory generation within a single denoising process.
By Zhexuan Zhou, Yichen Lai, Jinhao Zhang, Huizhe Li, Youmin Gong, Jie Mei
arXiv:2609.19142v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: World models endow perceptual systems with the ability to predict how scenes evolve under interaction. They are most beneficial when trained on diverse...
By Bardienus P. Duisterhof, Kaifeng Zhang, Adam Hung, Bowen Wen, Stan Birchfield, Yunzhu Li, Deva Ramanan, Jeffrey Ichnowski
arXiv:2606. 20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference.
By Gia-Binh Nguyen, Trong-Bao Ho, Thien-Loc Ha, Khoa Vo, Philip Lund M{\o}ller, Quang T. Nguyen, Long Dinh, Tuan Dam, Vu Duong, Tung M. Luu, Trung Le, Tran Nguyen Le, Minh Vu, An Thai Le, Ngan Le, Daniel Sonntag, James Zou, Jan Peters, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Ngo Anh Vien