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
NeuroSymbEAD is a large‑scale neuro‑symbolic caption dataset that builds an ego‑centric knowledge graph of static and dynamic objects on the KITTI‑360 dataset, annotating classes, categories, heading directions, orientations, and distances from the ego‑vehicle. The dataset generates multilevel textual captions that serve as a lightweight representation of an ego‑centric scene map, enabling outdoor scene‑map reconstruction, visual recognition, and object grounding. Baselines for driving common sense and traffic/scene understanding are established, and the dataset is benchmarked using pre‑trained grounding and learned auto‑regressive captioning networks to support vision‑language and foundation models for traffic‑scene explanation, 3D reasoning, and interpretable autonomous‑driving perception.
By Muhammad Ahmed Ullah Khan, Mohammed Elamine, Sheikh Talha Uddin, Didier Stricker, Sk Aziz Ali, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
arXiv:2607. 20988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models augmented with world modeling represent a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving.
By Quanfu Yu, Xian Wu, Hao Xu, Liulong Ma
The paper introduces Latent Action Driving Annotations (LADA), a three‑stage pipeline that converts large amounts of unlabelled observation‑trajectory data into a language‑conditioned driving model. First, a latent action model with a vector‑quantised bottleneck learns a compact codebook of vehicle intents. Then, a small set of language‑annotated examples trains a vision‑language translator to map observations and instructions into this codebook, and finally a VLA is trained on observation‑latent‑action pairs across the full corpus. Using less than 5% of language annotations, LADA attains a Driving Score of 87.98 and a Success Rate of 70.46% on Bench2Drive, matching or surpassing fully supervised baselines.
By Alexey Zakharov, Kemal Oksuz, Puneet K. Dokania
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:2603. 28963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation with realistic traffic agents is essential for validating autonomous driving systems.
By Mozhgan Pourkeshavarz, Tianran Liu, Nicholas Rhinehart