Abstract:World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling autonomous driving (AD) data, yet existing video generative models fall short as interactive simulators. Layout-conditioned renderers rely on "oracle" future trajectories of all background agents, rendering them strictly non-reactive. Conversely, pure action-conditioned predictors lack semantic control over complex interactions and suffer from prohibitive diffusion latencies, hindering closed-loop policy learning. To bridge this gap, we present CausalDrive, a controllable, real-time foundation driving world renderer. CausalDrive operates solely on the initial front-view frame, the ego-vehicle's trajectory, and a macroscopic text prompt. By excluding future NPC layouts, we compel the model to intrinsically predict causal interactions, enabling text-driven control over Driving Sociology, allowing users to dynamically orchestrate diverse counterfactual reactions to identical ego-actions. To overcome the efficiency bottleneck and address the covariate shift in autoregressive generation, we propose a novel Context-Forced DMD architecture. This combines continuous flow-matching with a self-correcting distillation objective, achieving interactive speeds of 12 FPS. This breakthrough transforms the passive video generator into a playable neural simulator. We demonstrate its versatility across three downstream applications: (1) generative closed-loop evaluation with significantly mitigated collision artifacts, (2) large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training driven by a Video2Reward module, and (3) real-time human-in-the-loop simulation. Extensive experiments validate that policies trained within CausalDrive's reactive scenarios exhibit superior interaction capabilities in the real world.
Abstract:With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.
Abstract:Reward models play a pivotal role in reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-modal trajectory selection for autonomous driving. However, acquiring such rewards typically relies on hand-crafted rule-based objectives or perception ground truth, which hinders generalization for data-scaling. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated feasibility as reward models in other domains, their effectiveness in driving tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by (1) introducing DriveReward, a reasoning trajectory evaluation dataset rigorously labeled via temporally-grounded visual guidance, and augmented with counterfactual driving behaviors., (2) alongside a specialized Vision-Language Reward Model. To address the scarcity of failure cases in conventional datasets, we propose a counterfactual data annotation scheme to construct cases encompassing diverse driving styles and erroneous behaviors. Evaluations on our proposed benchmark reveal that even leading open-source and proprietary VLMs fail to excel across all tasks, highlighting significant room for improvement in existing models. Building on these findings, we subsequently tailor a specialized 1B reward model that outperforms larger VLMs on task-specific reward alignment. Finally, we validate our reward model's effectiveness by integrating it into RL finetuning and multi-modal trajectory scoring across multiple baselines, achieving performance comparable to rule-based reward calculations in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluation.
Abstract:Autonomous driving requires reasoning about how ego actions shape the evolution of the surrounding world. However, most end-to-end methods rely on direct state-to-action mappings, capturing correlations without explicitly modeling action-conditioned dynamics. Conversely, continuous-latent world models often lack compositional structure for causal reasoning across counterfactual futures. We introduce Discrete-WAM, a unified latent vision-action world policy that represents future visual states and ego actions as aligned discrete tokens, enabling compositional causal reasoning across alternative futures. Built upon this unified discrete alignment, Discrete-WAM establishes a shared discrete diffusion framework with unified generative tasks, jointly formulating world modeling, world-action policy, and hierarchical decision-enabled policy, supporting compositional generalization across diverse driving scenarios. Experiments on large-scale autonomous-driving benchmarks show that Discrete-WAM achieves competitive performance while supporting controllable generation and counterfactual reasoning, offering a principled path toward more reliable decision-making.
Abstract:Navigation and manipulation are fundamental capabilities of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to interpret natural language commands and interact physically with their surroundings. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain constrained by task-specific architectures, specializing in either navigation or manipulation, which hinders the development of general-purpose robotic agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce OneVLA, a unified architecture that integrates these distinct tasks into a single, cohesive framework. Specifically, we design a unified action head capable of generating both navigation and manipulation actions without requiring task-specific variants. Furthermore, we propose a multi stage progressive training strategy-incorporating curated data construction and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning that facilitates strong positive transfer and mutual reinforcement between the two domains. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that OneVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both specialized single-task and existing cross-task models. By unifying these core capabilities, OneVLA paves the way for truly general-purpose robotic systems. The model and source code will be publicly released.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising framework for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing VLAs typically rely on sparse action supervision, which underutilizes their powerful scene understanding and reasoning capabilities. Recent attempts to incorporate dense visual supervision via world modeling often overemphasize pixel-level image reconstruction, neglecting semantically meaningful scene representation learning. In this work, we propose LVDrive, a Latent Visual representation enhanced VLA framework for autonomous driving. LVDrive introduces a future scene prediction task into the VLA paradigm, where future representations are learned entirely in a high-level latent space under auxiliary supervision from a pretrained vision backbone. Departing from inefficient autoregressive generation, we jointly model future scene and motion prediction within a unified embedding space, processed in a single forward pass to conduct the future-aware reasoning. We further design a two-stage trajectory decoding strategy that explicitly leverages the learned latent future representations to refine trajectory generation. Extensive experiments on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark demonstrate that LVDrive achieves significant improvements in closed-loop driving performance, outperforming both action supervised methods and image-reconstruction-based world model approaches.
Abstract:Existing imitation learning methods for end-to-end autonomous driving predominantly learn from successful demonstrations by minimizing geometric deviations from expert trajectories. This paradigm implicitly assumes that spatial proximity implies behavioral safety, leading to a critical objective mismatch: trajectories with nearly identical imitation losses may exhibit drastically different safety outcomes, where one remains recoverable while the other results in collision. To address this limitation, we propose BeyondDrive, a failure-aware imitation learning framework that jointly learns from successful and failed driving behaviors. First, we introduce a flow matching-based negative trajectory generator that synthesizes safety-critical yet expert-proximate trajectories, enabling explicit modeling of safety asymmetry. Second, we develop a diversity-aware sampling strategy that mitigates mode collapse and improves coverage of diverse failure modes during negative trajectory generation. Third, we propose a Repulsive Distance Loss that simultaneously attracts predictions toward expert demonstrations while repelling them from hard negative trajectories, thereby establishing discriminative safety boundaries in trajectory space. Applied to the uni-modal baseline Latent TransFuser, BeyondDrive achieves 89.7 PDMS on the NAVSIMv1 closed-loop benchmark, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, BeyondDrive generalizes effectively across different autonomous driving architectures, including multi-modal planners, and further demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability on the HUGSIM benchmark.
Abstract:Latent Action Models (LAMs) have emerged as an effective paradigm for handling heterogeneous datasets during Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model pretraining, offering a unified action space across embodiments. However, existing LAMs often rely on discrete quantization encode and decode pipelines, which can lead to trivial frame reconstruction behavior, limited representational capacity, and a lack of physically meaningful structure. We introduce RotVLA, a VLA framework built on a continuous rotational latent action representation. Latent actions are modeled as elements of SO(n), providing continuity, compositionality, and structured geometry aligned with real-world action dynamics. A triplet frame learning framework further enforces meaningful temporal dynamics while avoiding degeneration. RotVLA consists of a VLM backbone and a flow-matching action head, pretrained on large-scale cross-embodiment robotic datasets and human videos with latent-action supervision. For downstream robot control, the flow-matching head is extended into a unified action expert that jointly denoises latent and robot actions. Here, latent actions serve as a latent planner, providing high-level guidance that conditions action generation. With only 1.7B parameters and 1700+ hours of pretraining data, RotVLA achieves 98.2% on LIBERO and 89.6% / 88.5% on RoboTwin2.0 under clean and randomized settings, respectively. It also demonstrates strong real-world performance on manipulation tasks, consistently outperforming existing VLA models.
Abstract:High-fidelity reconstruction of driving scenes is crucial for autonomous driving. While recent feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods enable fast reconstruction, their per-pixel Gaussian prediction paradigm often suffers from multi-view inconsistency and layering artifacts. Moreover, existing methods often model dynamic instances via dense flow prediction, which lacks explicit cross-view correspondence and instance-level consistency. In this paper, we propose PointForward, a feedforward driving reconstruction framework through point-aligned representations. Unlike pixel-aligned methods, we initialize sparse 3D queries in world space and aggregate multi-view image information via spatial-temporal fusion onto these queries, enforcing explicit cross-view consistency in a single feedforward pass. To handle scene dynamics, we introduce scene graphs that explicitly organize moving instances during reconstruction. By leveraging 3D bounding boxes, our method enables instance-level motion propagation and temporally consistent dynamic representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointForward achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale driving benchmarks. The code will be available upon the publication of the paper.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models drive next-generation autonomous systems, but training them requires scalable, high-quality annotations from complex environments. Current cloud pipelines rely on generic vision-language models (VLMs) that lack geometric reasoning and domain semantics due to their 2D image-text pretraining. To address this mismatch, we propose XEmbodied, a cloud-side foundation model that endows VLMs with intrinsic 3D geometric awareness and interaction with physical cues (e.g., occupancy grids, 3D boxes). Instead of treating geometry as auxiliary input, XEmbodied integrates geometric representations via a structured 3D Adapter and distills physical signals into context tokens using an Efficient Image-Embodied Adapter. Through progressive domain curriculum and reinforcement learning post-training, XEmbodied preserves general capabilities while demonstrating robust performance across 18 public benchmarks. It significantly improves spatial reasoning, traffic semantics, embodied affordance, and out-of-distribution generalization for large-scale scenario mining and embodied VQA.