Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gabriel George Zipperercs.LG cs.AI cs.RO
This paper presents a low-cost, open experimental platform for research in end-to-end autonomous driving with miniature Ackermann vehicles. The platform combines a physical vehicle, a printed urban track, data collection tools, trajectory registration, and a Webots digital twin, enabling controlled experiments that connect simulation-based autonomous-driving methods to real-world execution. As a first baseline, we implement command-conditioned behavior cloning, in which a neural policy receives an on-board camera image and a high-level navigation command and outputs steering and speed. The system is evaluated both on the physical vehicle and in simulation. In real closed-loop experiments, the learned policy follows lanes and executes commanded turns, reaching a mean cross-track error of 6.1 cm with respect to the reference route, close to the 4.7 cm observed in human demonstrations. In the digital twin, camera field of view has a strong effect on performance, reducing the mean cross-track error from 35.6 to 3.3 cm when widened from 58 to 120 degrees. Using the digital twin to generate synthetic driving data and a learned sim-to-real image translator to reduce the appearance gap, we further show that a higher-capacity policy trained on this synthetic data combined with real demonstrations is the only configuration that completes all four track routes in closed loop, whereas the compact baseline and the same network trained on real data alone complete fewer. These results establish the open platform as a practical testbed for sim-to-real studies and provide an initial command-conditioned imitation-learning baseline; we release it to support reproducible research.
Bridging the gap between the discrete reasoning of Vision-Language Models and the continuous, physics-constrained nature of autonomous driving remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce LaPla, a unified Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework featuring latent-aligned planning to seamlessly ground semantic understanding in precise motion execution. We first design an action tokenizer based on a residual vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), capturing vehicle kinematics and encoding trajectory features into a structured latent space. Rather than discrete codebook lookups that inevitably introduce quantization errors, LaPla repurposes this representation as a physical prior to bridge the modality gap between high-dimensional semantics and the raw action space. Specifically, given multimodal inputs integrating multi-view images, historical actions, and textual instructions, LaPla incorporates concurrent action queries to causally attend to the multimodal context in a single forward pass, projecting hidden states directly into the pretrained VQ-VAE latent space. The frozen decoder then translates these continuous latents into actions, effectively eliminating quantization errors and ensuring physically plausible trajectories while bypassing time-consuming autoregressive generation. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that LaPla achieves competitive open-loop performance, reducing long-horizon L2 error by 15.52% compared to state-of-the-art VLA methods. Closed-loop evaluations on the NVIDIA AlpaSim simulator further confirm its superior capability in ensuring smooth driving progress, improving the success rate by 33.34 percentage points with significantly reduced inference latency.
Jinyang Wang, Shiwei Li, Junjian Wang +12cs.CV cs.RO
World models (WMs) have demonstrated strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by learning predictive representations of future scene dynamics. However, generating future videos during inference introduces substantial computational overhead, leading many recent driving WMs to adopt a single front camera as input for efficient deployment. This design restricts spatial coverage in safety-critical maneuvers such as lane changes, merges, and turns. To address this limitation, we propose SV-WAM, a surround-view world-action model (WAM) that preserves full six-camera observations while maintaining efficient inference. SV-WAM leverages future-video prediction as dense training supervision for action learning within a shared generative model, rather than as an inference-time output. At the core of this design is an action-centered causal mask that prevents action tokens from attending to future-video tokens during joint action-video denoising. Consequently, the video branch can be discarded at deployment, enabling efficient action-only planning. Furthermore, we introduce a differentiable drivable-area compliance regularizer that penalizes vehicle-footprint corners approaching or crossing drivable boundaries, improving planning safety and boundary awareness. Extensive experiments on the closed-loop NAVSIMv2 benchmark and the open-loop nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that SV-WAM achieves state-of-the-art planning performance with low inference latency and competitive zero-shot transfer capability.
World models offer a promising paradigm for autonomous driving by predicting how traffic scenes may evolve and using such predictions to support action generation. However, existing approaches either separate future prediction from action generation or jointly predict them at the same temporal scale, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve long-horizon anticipation and responsive, observation-grounded decision making. We present Drive-HWM, a hierarchical slow--fast world modeling framework that organizes future representation prediction and action generation at complementary temporal scales. The slow world model predicts multi-step future representations to capture extended scene evolution. To explicitly model the abundant motion dynamics in driving environments, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Latents learned through optical-flow prediction. Guided by these future representations, the fast model uses a lightweight multimodal backbone and an autoregressive expert to jointly predict the next frame and the immediate action from the latest observation. Next-frame prediction encourages the fast model to capture imminent scene evolution, while one-step action generation allows decisions to be continuously updated as new observations arrive. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM v1 and v2 demonstrate the strong driving performance of Drive-HWM. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the hierarchical slow--fast design, dynamics-aware future representations, and joint next-frame and action prediction.
End-to-end autonomous driving in urban environments requires robust decision-making under partial observability and complex multi-agent interactions. Severe occlusions and dense traffic at intersections limit the perception capability of single-agent systems, motivating recent efforts on Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) cooperation for perception and planning. However, existing evaluation protocols face a fundamental trade-off: open-loop evaluation fails to capture error accumulation and recovery from deviations, while closed-loop evaluation is costly, difficult to scale, and often relies on simulated environments that may suffer from domain gaps. To bridge this gap, we propose VIPS, a benchmark for cooperative autonomous driving in V2I settings based on pseudo-simulation. VIPS extends pseudo-simulation by integrating vehicle and infrastructure observations. This enables scalable yet realistic evaluation of robustness and error propagation without full simulation. We further present CoS-V2X, a cooperative planning framework based on sparse representations. CoS-V2X models vehicle-infrastructure interactions using compact features for efficient communication and robust decision-making under heterogeneous observations. Code and dataset are available at https://vips2026.github.io.
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have shown strong potential in autonomous driving by leveraging multimodal pretraining for instruction following, visual reasoning, and scene-level generalization. In robotic manipulation, scaling VLA fine-tuning across multiple robot setups--especially when unifying representations across embodiments--has been shown to improve in-dataset performance and cross-embodiment generalization; in autonomous driving, however, VLAs remain largely trained on individual datasets and are rarely evaluated for zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets and camera rigs; furthermore naively adding more datasets to the training data does not necessarily lead to better performance within seen embodiments. To address these problems, we study multi-dataset training for the driving task and BEV-Forcing, an auxiliary objective that transfers ground-plane object-layout information from a specialized Bird's-Eye-View model into the VLA backbone. By encouraging the model to represent object position through a shared BEV spatial interface, we show that an auxiliary task such as BEV-Forcing can improve both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance when training on a small number of camera rigs. As the number of training embodiments increases, however, the benefits of the auxiliary task are reduced; we present this as evidence that new techniques in the literature may see their benefits diminish when simply scaling up training diversity, which motivates presenting results taking into account data scaling.
Shucheng Zhang, Yuang Zhang, Bingzhang Wang +3cs.RO cs.AI
Generating safety-critical scenarios is essential for evaluating autonomous driving systems. However, existing generators primarily focus on inducing collisions and offer limited control over where contact occurs on the target vehicle. In this paper, we study fine-grained safety-critical scenario generation, where success requires both a target collision and a specified head, rear, or side contact region. We propose CrashDiffuser, a closed-loop VLM-guided diffusion framework that decouples semantic collision reasoning from continuous trajectory synthesis through a hierarchical collision-intent interface derived from the requested target contact region. At initialization, the VLM extracts reusable scene-level context; at each replanning step, it predicts a structured action tuple describing speed change, turning behavior, and collision stage. This intent conditions a diffusion model to generate executable adversarial trajectories, while collision-guided sampling, candidate selection, and short-horizon replanning adapt generation to the target vehicle's evolving behavior. On WOMD-derived closed-loop scenarios, CrashDiffuser achieves a target-collision rate of 50.33% in a single attempt and 67.98% after three attempts, together with a contact-region control success rate of 40.05% and competitive trajectory naturalness. Component ablations further support the proposed design.
Steffen Hagedorn, Aron Distelzweig, Alexandru P. Condurachecs.RO cs.AI
In trajectory planning for autonomous driving, hybrid planning architectures are often realized as a collection of disparate modules, each with its own objectives. This lack of a unifying principle can lead to inconsistencies between the initial and refined trajectory, resulting in suboptimal behavior. We address this by introducing DiffuSearch, a novel hybrid planner that uses a unified set of objectives across generation and refinement. Our model encourages all components to follow the same shared driving goals: collision avoidance, drivable area compliance, comfort, and progress. DiffuSearch employs a two-stage architecture. First, a guided diffusion model generates a scene-consistent, joint trajectory prediction, using our driving objectives as differentiable guidance functions to implicitly steer the denoising process. Second, a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) in a discretized action space performs an explicit, local refinement of this proposal, leveraging the same driving objectives as its reward function. This synergistic design leverages the diffusion model's strength in finding scene-consistent solutions combined with the explainable, constraint-aware refinement of MCTS. Experiments on nuPlan and interPlan reactive closed-loop benchmarks demonstrate that DiffuSearch achieves strong and often state-of-the-art performance, substantially reducing collisions and improving comfort, particularly in complex, interactive scenarios. Our ablation studies indicate that MCTS refinement is the main mechanism behind the gains, while sharing objectives between implicit guidance and explicit search provides further consistent improvements.
Many current end-to-end driving policies emit a pool of candidate trajectories and select one, which makes selection a separable component: a scorer can be retrained while the planner, its backbone, and its trajectory generator all stay frozen. However, many strong planners concentrate their proposals around safe mode, providing limited supervision near decision boundaries. In this work, we design a training dataset that provides more informative supervision for the scorer. In particular, we construct two generators that perturb the logged human trajectory along the two axes a vehicle can be displaced: laterally toward the drivable boundary and longitudinally toward a leading vehicle. The designed dataset produces more informative positive and negative samples than the base planner's proposal pool. We attach a transformer-based scorer to two frozen generative planners, DiffusionDrive and MeanFuser, and train it on the NAVSIM navtrain dataset. The results of the experiments show that we achieve 90.1 EPDMS on DiffusionDrive and 90.4 EPDMS on MeanFuser when using ResNet-34, with 0.4 and 0.3 EPDMS respectively, from the designed training dataset.
Early recognition of lane-change intention is essential for proactive decision-making in autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. This paper proposes a Dual Neural-Calibrated Interacting Multiple Model (DNC-IMM) that improves adaptability to driving context while preserving the probabilistic structure and interpretability of a conventional IMM. The proposed method encodes driving-context information, including target-vehicle motion, gaps to surrounding vehicles, and relative velocities, with a neural network that calibrates both the transition-probability matrix and measurement likelihoods. The final intention is determined from the calibrated IMM mode posterior rather than from a separate direct classifier. Experiments on the highD dataset demonstrate that the proposed method reliably recognizes lane-change intentions before lane crossing and provides particularly strong performance at the earlier 2-3 s prediction horizons.
Ahmad Alfan Alfian Irfan, Nur Ahmad Khatim, Mansur Ariefcs.AI cs.CV
Many automobile and mobility companies deploy learned driving policies on embedded computers with limited memory and power. Pruning, knowledge distillation, and quantization are the standard methods to reduce the size and the inference cost of these policies. However, these methods are commonly assessed by aggregate numerical scores, and such scores may not reflect the ability of the policy to drive safely when interacting with other road users. In this study, we propose a stage-wise closed-loop evaluation approach to follow a driving policy through a compression pipeline. We formulate the driving task as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and train a belief-state policy with proximal policy optimization (PPO) in Gym-Duckietown. We then extract the actor, compress it one stage at a time, and evaluate it on five driving curricula. We show that structured pruning is the stage at which the driving capability is first lost. Meanwhile, distillation improves the pruned actor, but the improvement is limited by its rehearsal data. Integer quantization of the improved actor loses some of the curricula that require the vehicle to stop and then resume. Interestingly, the same procedure on the unpruned actor preserves all five curricula. Our study thus provides an empirical analysis aiming to answer the currently active discussions on how to accept a compressed driving policy, so as to achieve a safe and statistically reliable deployment of automated driving functions.
Zhengxu Tang, Guofeng Cui, Ziyu Gong +8cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL cs.RO
Long-tail autonomous driving failures are often framed as rare-object recognition errors. We argue that this view is incomplete: the decision-critical question is not only whether a model recognizes an unusual object, but whether it infers how that object changes the ego vehicle's feasible high-level actions. We formalize this problem as decision-level driving affordance prediction, where a model maps a front-view image, ego-motion history, and navigation command to a structured longitudinal--lateral meta-action. To evaluate this capability, we introduce CoLT-Drive, a 3,536-sample counterfactual long-tail benchmark that inserts rare objects into otherwise fixed driving scenes and measures whether models predict acceptable action pairs. To improve deployable small VLMs, we propose KPA, a knowledge-preserving adaptation framework that combines structured perception-to-decision prompting, SLERP-based expert merging, and RegMoE, a regime-aware LoRA mixture-of-experts module. KPA preserves the pretrained model's open-world knowledge while allocating lightweight adaptation capacity to different driving decision regimes. Experiments on an in-domain driving split and CoLT-Drive show that KPA achieves 60.8\% pair accuracy on CoLT-Drive, outperforming the pretrained Qwen3-VL-2B baseline (50.3\%) and LoRA SFT (32.4\%) while maintaining competitive in-domain accuracy. Our benchmark and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tangzx2024/CoLT-Drive and https://github.com/tangzhengxu/CoLT-Drive.
Zhengxu Tang, Xiaozhou Zhang, Guofeng Cui +10cs.CV cs.CL cs.RO
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning powers generative models by eliciting intermediate steps before producing an answer. In autonomous driving, the answer is a continuous action. Thus its reasoning must share the same spatiotemporal structure as the physical world. This survey studies the resulting shift from textual CoT to action-grounded reasoning. Surveying 171 papers, including 130 method papers and 41 benchmarks, datasets, surveys, and analysis papers, we propose a representation-centered taxonomy that treats the form of the intermediate state as the organizing axis. We systematize the 130 methods into four categories: language-based, visual-spatial, latent-dynamic, and externalized reasoning, further divided into 13 subtypes tied to distinct regions of interests. Our synthesis shows that the open frontier of reasoning in driving agents lies in intermediate representations that can be grounded in the real world, coupled to real-time action, and verified under safety-critical systems. Project page: https://github.com/tangzhengxu/awesome-av-cot.
We present Qwen-Drive-1.0, an initial step towards a vision-language foundation model for autonomous driving. Qwen-Drive-1.0 retains the architecture of the pretrained vision-language model (VLM) and integrates 3D perception, visual question answering, and motion planning within a unified framework. An external bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception head jointly performs 3D object detection, semantic occupancy prediction, and BEV map segmentation. It serves as a probe of the 3D information accessible from the shared representations and provides an explicit, inspectable interface to 3D scene structure. A Planning Expert conditions on shared VLM representations to generate future ego trajectories. A staged training recipe combines driving supervision with general-purpose vision-language data to acquire driving-specific competence while helping preserve broad visual understanding and instruction-following capabilities. Experiments demonstrate strong 3D perception and driving scene understanding while largely preserving general vision-language capability. Comprehensive evaluations across open-loop, pseudo-closed-loop, and closed-loop settings further show highly competitive motion-planning performance.
Training autonomous driving policies through pure self-play has recently shown promising results. Following Gigaflow and Puffer- Drive, we train driving policies in a similar self-play fashion, but extend the models from MLPs to Transformers and train on the high-definition map of a real city, where we ultimately aim to deploy them. On the CARLA and Waymax benchmarks, our policies fall short of Gigaflow, and we trace the gap to specific failure modes, including reward hacking at traffic lights and a missing incentive to stop at stop signs. We further analyze which traffic rules emerge from self-play and how closely they match human driving, and we confirm that reward conditioning yields the intended diversity of driving behaviors. A demonstration of a trained policy is available at https://laursisask-ut.github.io/eccvdemo.
Marcello Cellina, Akos Kriston, Antonio Migneco +7cs.RO cs.CV
Testing of commercial Advanced Driver Assistance Systems is essential to ensure safety and compliance during type approval and in service operation. However, proving ground scenarios may not reflect real world driving complexity, while geo fencing can require manufacturer collaboration and limit assessment independence. This work presents a methodology for independently testing Assisted Lane Change systems on public roads. A campaign on the A31 French motorway used a test vehicle equipped with a LiDAR based vehicle detection and tracking system. Tests covered combinations of inter vehicle distance and speed between the test vehicle and the take over vehicle. Real time kinematic global navigation satellite system receivers assessed detection and tracking performance. Recorded lane change trajectories were compared with the lane change suppression requirements of UNECE Regulation Number 79. Of 27 predefined lane change manoeuvres, 18 were completed and 9 suppressed. In 6 cases, the system allowed manoeuvres that did not meet regulatory minimum distance requirements. In 3 cases, the deviation remained statistically significant after accounting for measurement uncertainty. To the authors knowledge, this is the first public road campaign designed to assess Assisted Lane Change compliance with Regulation Number 79 safety distance requirements. The results demonstrate the suitability of LiDAR based sensing for this purpose. The methodology can support market surveillance and future regulatory revisions by revealing real world behaviours not covered by approval procedures.
Intent misinterpretation during vehicle interactions causes recurring planning failures. We study a decision layer in which a language-guided intent module reads structured descriptors, computes a smoothed intent-geometry divergence score, and gates the planned maneuver before commitment, upstream of a corridor envelope. On a replayed off-road departure and four crash clips under a frozen, disclosed implementation, gating is the only layer that repairs the plan: on the main case it fires 72 ms after the drift onset but 161 ms before the corridor exit, keeping the trajectory in the corridor in all ten replays. The first calibration draws nine false triggers in 5.9 minutes, each from scoring uncertainty as half a conflict; a preregistered redesign treating uncertainty as abstention cuts this to 0.341 per minute. Two ablations bound the model's contribution: the full score detects fastest on four of five failures under the deployed eligibility, three of five against the unvetoed rule (000871 by one cycle; 000228 by a pre-onset fire on an uncertain stretch that five clips cannot classify as signal or coincidence; dropping the confidence term costs two detections), while on in-domain tracks at equal false positives the geometric rule more than triples its detection. The evidence supports the gating mechanism; the model's demonstrated roles are the fastest detection on these failures and an uncertainty veto on the geometric rule.
Weijiang Xiong, Lan Feng, Alexandre Alahi +1cs.RO cs.AI
Autonomous driving has made remarkable progress through imitation learning with massive human demonstration data. However, a trained planner often degrades severely when applied to a new environment zero-shot, because of domain shifts in traffic regulations, road layout and driving behaviors. Therefore, adapting a trajectory planner to a new city typically requires resource-demanding local data collection with a vehicle sensor suite. In this work, we show that driving behavior can be learned from a scalable and efficient alternative. We introduce \emph{SkyDrive}, a framework that utilizes drone-based traffic monitoring to provide efficient supervision for autonomous driving agents in a new environment. While vehicle-based data collection logs the ego and its surroundings, an aerial platform naturally observes many road users simultaneously over an extended field of view. As a result, every vehicle can be a data source with grounded driving behavior, effectively scaling up the amount of supervision. Based on 137 hours of aerial traffic monitoring footage, we extract 650K driving samples and construct a benchmark for trajectory planners and motion predictors. Zero-shot experiments with multiple models reveal significant cross-city domain gaps, but many of them can be alleviated by limited supervision from the sky, e.g., 30 minutes of monitoring per location. Our findings show that aerial traffic monitoring is an efficient and scalable data source for adapting autonomous driving systems in new cities. Data and code will be made publicly available.
Adaptive LiDAR scanning concentrates a limited sensing budget on regions of interest predicted from past object tracks, lowering data volume in autonomous driving while maintaining detection accuracy. However, existing scanning policies face three challenges. First, history-driven approaches depend on past tracks, so unseen objects are detected late or missed. Second, random or uniform sampling outside the predicted regions has no awareness of where new objects appear. Third, camera-guided alternatives spend budget on all camera detections, resampling objects already covered, costing recall in crowded scenes and range when budgets are scarce. This paper introduces the CAmera-REsidual reserve (CARE), a training-free allocation rule that reserves part of a fixed ray budget for the directions of current camera detections that the track forecasts cannot explain; the rest follows the base history policy, and unused reserve returns to a random floor. The paper makes three contributions. First, a leakage-free ray-budget evaluation on nuScenes (150 scenes, 4,148 events) measuring the first-sighting loss of history-driven scanning, with a strict-causal variant using the preceding keyframe. Second, CARE raises first-sighting recall by 5.2, 5.2, and 4.3 points at 10%, 20%, and 35% budgets over the history policy, with paired intervals excluding zero; the camera cue drives this gain, and the first-sighting versus overall trade-off is a budget-dependent Pareto choice. Third, a safety-bounded forgetting module that releases budget from receding or static tracks beyond a speed-dependent guard distance; at tight budgets, forgetting without the guard significantly harms near-field recall, so the guard is what keeps it safe. The pipeline runs end to end on a real vehicle and, in closed-loop simulation, detects an occluded pedestrian earlier and brakes more reliably than history-driven scanning.
World action models (WAMs) have recently gained increasing attention as a framework for jointly modeling scene evolution and ego actions in autonomous driving. Most existing WAMs learn scene dynamics in pixel space by combining a video-generation backbone for future-observation prediction with an action head for ego-trajectory prediction. Pixels, however, provide only an indirect representation of these dynamics: they entangle geometry and motion with appearance, texture, and illumination, forcing the model to infer three-dimensional transformations from two-dimensional observations. We argue that geometry, represented by point clouds, offers a more natural state space for driving because it explicitly captures spatial structure and the rigid and non-rigid transformations that govern scene evolution while directly aligning with the space in which driving actions are executed. Building on this insight, we introduce \textbf{GeoWAM}, a visual geometry world action model for autonomous driving. Rather than predicting future images, GeoWAM is pretrained to forecast future scene geometry, yielding representations that jointly encode spatial structure and temporal evolution. A geometry-conditioned action head then leverages these learned geometric dynamics to predict future ego trajectories. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop evaluations show that visual geometry world modeling yields substantially stronger driving policies than image-based alternatives, establishing future-geometry prediction as an effective pretraining objective for autonomous driving.
Ziying Song, Shengkai Zhang, Lin Liu +8cs.CV cs.RO
Long-horizon planning is critical for safe autonomous driving in complex scenarios. Existing methods improve planning continuity with temporal memory, but such memory may become invalid and mislead decisions when the driving command changes. Thus, selectively leveraging useful history while suppressing command-inconsistent memory remains a key challenge. To address this issue, we propose MomADv2, a reliable state-space memory framework for long-horizon end-to-end autonomous driving. At its core, MomADv2 introduces a Selective State-Space Planning Memory Query Module, which filters historical planning queries based on temporal continuity and command consistency, selects planning modes relevant to the current command, and models the evolution of planning intentions through a selective state-space mechanism. To further alleviate local trajectory deviations and error accumulation in long-horizon planning, we design a Flow-Matching Trajectory Residual Refiner. It learns a continuous residual correction field from the refined planning output to the expert trajectory, enabling fine-grained trajectory refinement while preserving the stability of anchor-based planning. Extensive experiments on closed-loop NAVSIM and Bench2Drive, as well as open-loop nuScenes, demonstrate that MomADv2 improves long-horizon planning consistency and reduces the average collision rate by 15.6% over MomAD under 6-second planning.
Modern driving action models are increasingly improved in a self-improvement loop, where a learned world simulator imagines future observations and the resulting data is fed back to refine the action model. However, the bottleneck of this loop lies in the simulators' inability to generate behaviorally plausible responses by surrounding agents, making generated data both unrealistic in interaction and imbalanced in distribution. We introduce BehaviorWorldGen, a framework that closes the loop between action models and world simulators through controllable behavior-aware structured world generation. Its core component is BehaviorFlow, a meta-action-conditioned traffic-flow model that injects interpretable behavior controls and jointly generates multi-agent rollouts. BehaviorFlow realizes the specified agent behaviors while allowing surrounding vehicles to respond to the ego and to one another. The resulting rollouts are rendered by a world simulator into realistic multi-view observations, which are paired with corrected interaction-aware trajectories for action-model refinement. Since BehaviorWorldGen uses structured trajectories as the interface between its modules, it is compatible with diverse action models and world simulators. Experiments on world generation, scene extrapolation, and policy refinement demonstrate consistent improvements, with the largest benefits concentrated on difficult interactive scenarios.
Collaborative perception extends the sensing range of a single vehicle by fusing observations from nearby agents, which improves the robustness of autonomous driving. In realistic deployments, however, the received collaborator messages are often affected by both communication delay and relative-pose noise, which jointly cause stale observations, spatial misalignment, and unstable feature fusion. Existing methods usually address these issues from either the spatial or temporal side, but handling them jointly in a unified and efficient manner remains challenging. In this paper, we propose CoAnchor, an anchor-centric spatio-temporal alignment framework for asynchronous collaborative perception. Instead of directly reasoning on dense BEV features, CoAnchor builds sparse object-level spatio-temporal anchors as a shared interface for pose correction and tightly connects spatial refinement, temporal propagation, and current-time verification within one unified loop, while keeping the overall correction process lightweight. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets illustrate that CoAnchor remains competitive under clean settings and improves the robustness under joint delay and pose perturbations with a favorable practical accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) learns powerful spatiotemporal representations from video through self-supervised latent feature prediction. However, V-JEPA is built around random-mask completion and deterministic regression, making it fundamentally ill-suited for autonomous driving planning that demands future-directed prediction tightly coupled with action. To address this, we rethink the V-JEPA paradigm and present WA-JEPA, a V-JEPA-native world-action model designed for autonomous driving planning. Instead of random spatiotemporal masking, WA-JEPA employs hybrid future-masked pre-training, where the model infers future latents from observed context. Departing from deterministic regression, we recast future prediction as conditional flow matching over latent futures, which substantially improves the model's ability to generate plausible future latents for downstream planning. Finally, a joint future-action predictor is proposed to denoise future scene tokens and ego trajectories together in a unified spatiotemporal latent space, allowing action supervision to directly shape planning-relevant world representations. Pre-trained on nuPlan videos and fine-tuned on NAVSIM, WA-JEPA reaches 91.7 EPDMS on NAVSIM-v2, surpassing the strongest end-to-end and world-action baselines by 1.6 and 1.3 EPDMS, and, without HUGSIM-specific fine-tuning, attains the best HD-Score of 0.4462 on the closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark under the same evaluation protocol. These results validate V-JEPA-native world-action modeling as a powerful and scalable paradigm for autonomous driving planning. Code is available at https://github.com/AFARI-Research/WA-JEPA.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly integrating perception, reasoning, and decision making within a unified multimodal framework. However, most existing VLA models formulate end-to-end autonomous driving as a visual question answering task, leading to unreliable and less interpretable decision reasoning. In addition, they fail to establish effective multi-modal interaction across heterogeneous sensors, thereby limiting robust scene perception and reliable driving reasoning in long-tail driving scenarios. To this end, we propose a robust VLA-based end-to-end autonomous driving system that combines multi-modality interaction with multi-trajectory planning and optimization, enabling more reliable, interpretable, and safer driving decisions. Our method comprises three core components: (1) Affinity-Guided Optimal Transport for main-auxiliary modality two-way interaction; (2) Distribution-Consistent Modality Transfer for heterogeneous modality distribution transfer and cross-modal interaction; (3) Multi-modal Multi-Trajectory Planning along with Perception-Oriented Trajectory Refinement for better driving decisions to long-tail driving scenarios. Experimental results in open-loop and closed-loop datasets demonstrate improvements in safety long-horizon driving reasoning and road scene perception over existing driving systems, highlighting the ability of our mutli-modality interaction and multi-trajectory planning and optimization for scalable VLA-based systems.
Bala Murali Manoghar Sai Sudhakar, Sourab Bapu Sridhar, Sandipan Das +5cs.RO cs.CV
Behavior-cloned Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving policies struggle with rare rule-governed maneuvers at signalized intersections. Braking and launching examples contribute little to averaged trajectory loss, while fused representations lack explicit supervision for the governing traffic-light and stop-line state. We present RedLight-VLA, a training objective that uses expert futures and automatically generated perception targets without additional manual rule annotation. First, trajectory-derived behavioral reweighting (BR) emphasizes rare deceleration and acceleration using rotation-invariant longitudinal dynamics and a scale-preserving reduction that exactly recovers the baseline when disabled. Second, parallel auxiliary (AUX) heads ground traffic-light and stop-line state in continuous post-fusion rule tokens, without autoregressive language generation or changes to the trajectory decoder. We evaluate on a curated set of 20 s sequences with a 5 s prediction horizon. Controlled variants share the same backbone, training data, decoder, and evaluation population. Against an otherwise identical VLA baseline, RedLight-VLA reduces red-light stop-line overshoot from 7.3% to6.8%, reduces stop-line velocity error by 12.7%, and improves 3 s trafficlight-sliced ADE/FDE from 0.274/0.964 m to 0.247/0.897 m. Green-light false stops increase from 3.2% to 3.9%; however, combining BR with AUX supervision mitigates the larger increase observed for AUX alone (4.0%). The combined model also improves non-traffic-light ADE/FDE from 0.268/0.956 m to 0.241/0.876 m and outperforms either mechanism alone on all four sliced displacement measures.
Mehdi Azarafza, Faezeh Pasandideh, Ali Ehteshami Bejnordi +2cs.MA cs.CL cs.CV
Autonomous vehicles require robust perception and decision-making capabilities to operate in diverse and unseen scenarios. While reinforcement learning and rule-based methods can provide effective control and safety mechanisms, their performance may degrade in situations requiring contextual reasoning. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding multimodal information and generating contextual reasoning, however, their use for direct vehicle control can introduce latency and hallucination risks. To address these limitations, a hybrid framework is proposed. This system uses an orchestrator to coordinate PPO-trained reinforcement learning and PID control, with LLM common-sense reasoning applied throughout the framework. LLM reasoning is further employed iteratively to refine the RL reward function for dynamic driving environments. The proposed framework is evaluated in highly randomized CARLA scenarios under diverse environmental and traffic conditions. The results demonstrate the potential of integrating LLM-based reasoning with conventional autonomous driving methods while retaining structured control and safety mechanism.
Autonomous driving systems must operate under partial observability, where safety-critical objects may be occluded or visible only to neighboring connected vehicles. Vehicle-to-vehicle cooperation can reduce this uncertainty, but existing cooperative driving methods often compress multi-agent evidence into latent features or hidden multimodal states. As a result, they obscure which agent observed each object, whether the object is visible to the ego vehicle, and how conflicting evidence affects downstream decisions. We propose G-MARK, a grounded multi-agent reasoning framework that converts cooperative object-centric observations into explicit provenance-aware knowledge graphs (KGs). The resulting KGs preserve object hypotheses together with their source attribution, ego-versus-partner visibility, uncertainty, conflicts, spatial relations, and planning-relevant context. G-MARK then derives a shared feature representation from these KGs, enabling lightweight task heads to support object reasoning, motion prediction, control selection, and trajectory forecasting. Compared with the state-of-the-art baseline, GMARK improves occlusion reasoning accuracy by 42.2%, reduces control-selection error by 13.1%, and achieves comparable trajectory-planning accuracy with a 25.6x smaller structured communication payload. Our code is available at https://github.com/bhavyagupta98/g-mark.
World Action Models (WAMs) improve planning by incorporating future world evolution into action generation, yet existing methods allocate a fixed imagination budget to every scene. We propose RISE (\textbf{R}efining \textbf{I}magination through \textbf{SE}lective Rollout), a system-level adaptive imagination framework that makes sequential \textsc{Roll}/\textsc{Stop} decisions according to the expected planning benefit of continued rollout. At each step, a Latent Evaluator estimates the risk revealed by the current prefix and how much planning could improve if imagination continues, while a Rollout Gate weighs this expected benefit against additional computation cost. Since factual driving logs expose only one realized future, we further construct \textbf{CounterDrive}, a counterfactual dataset with diverse outcomes and risk levels, to enrich future dynamics and provide localized risk supervision. Each retained sample undergoes expert verification and annotation of trajectory validity, incident onset, and causal category, providing a reusable resource for safety-critical world-modeling research. Experiments on NAVSIM and nuScenes show that RISE achieves the best overall planning performance while reducing unnecessary rollout, with additional transfer results supporting its plug-in generality across WAM architectures.
Reliable performance evaluation is a central bottleneck for deploying robot-learning policies in real-world conditions. Real-world testing is faithful but costly and difficult to scale, whereas simulation-based testing scales easily but is inevitably biased by the sim-to-real gap. Existing simulation-augmented methods combine limited real-world rollouts with abundant simulation proxies, but focus on performance averaged over initial conditions and deployment settings. Such population-level averages obscure scenario-specific variation and provide limited guidance about when and where a policy can be safely deployed. We propose SCAPE, a scenario-conditioned simulation-augmented policy evaluation framework that predicts scenario-conditioned real-world policy performance using limited paired sim-and-real samples and large-scale simulation rollouts. SCAPE corrects sim-to-real bias in simulation labels before training the prediction model and calibrates prediction uncertainty through conformal prediction. We validate SCAPE on autonomous driving and quadruped velocity tracking. In sim-to-sim studies, SCAPE reduces scenario-level prediction error by 4.9%/34.7% (driving) and 14.5%/27.7% (quadruped) relative to scene-conditioned neural and aggregate statistical baselines on average. We further evaluate a velocity-tracking policy deployed on a physical Unitree Go2. SCAPE also improves testing sample efficiency, produces narrower calibrated prediction intervals, generalizes better to out-of-distribution scenarios, and enables fine-grained deployment strategies.