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.
By Zhengxu Tang, Xiaozhou Zhang, Guofeng Cui, Ziyu Gong, Zi Wang, Yunfei Shi, Ruifeng Deng, Chengzhi Qi, Ke Chen, Sachin Patil, Tianjun Xiao, Langechuan Liu, Pichao Wang
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
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
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
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: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