DriveMA: Driving Vision-Language-Action Models with verifiable Meta-Actions

Driving Vision-Language-Action Models (Driving VLAs) aim to use language to improve end-to-end planning, but the language-action gap limits this promise. We propose DriveMA, a Driving VLA framework built on verifiable meta-actions, which summarize future ego motion into compact language-domain intentions and can be constructed from expert trajectories with a trajectory-grounded annotation pipeline and can be verified against generated trajectories through rule-based projection. DriveMA exploits this verifiability with action-centric supervised training and a data-efficient turn-level credit assignment reinforcement learning framework, explicitly aligning high-level decisions with low-level trajectory planning through dense rewards and precise credit assignment. DriveMA sets a new state of the art on the Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, achieving a Rater Feedback Score of 8.060 with a 2B model and further improving it to 8.079 with a 4B model; it also obtains competitive closed-loop planning performance on NAVSIM. These results show that even a simple meta-action interface can achieve state-of-the-art planning when made verifiable and optimized for language-action alignment. Code, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research.

DriveMA: Rethinking Language Interfaces in Driving VLAs with One-Step Meta-Actions

Driving Vision-Language-Action Models (Driving VLAs) commonly introduce natural-language reasoning as an intermediate interface for end-to-end planning, but reasoning-centric interfaces face three practical bottlenecks: obtaining high-quality reasoning annotations is difficult, generating and understanding long reasoning chains is challenging for compact models, and inference latency is substantially increased. In this paper, we rethink the design of language interfaces in Driving VLAs and show that concise one-step meta-actions are a simple yet effective alternative to verbose reasoning. Meta-actions provide semantic decision grounding while remaining low-entropy, and being automatically derivable from expert trajectories, enabling scalable supervision and reliable trajectory conditioning. Building on this interface, we propose DriveMA, which combines action-centric supervised training with a turn-level credit-assignment reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes meta-action correctness, trajectory quality, and trajectory--meta-action consistency. Experiments show that DriveMA already achieves a new state of the art on the Waymo End-to-End Driving Challenge with a 2B model, reaching a Rater Feedback Score (RFS) of 8.060, while its 4B version further improves the state of the art to 8.079; DriveMA also obtains competitive performance on NAVSIM. Ablations demonstrate that one-step meta-actions offer a better practical trade-off between expressiveness, predictability, and inference efficiency than natural-language reasoning or finer-grained action sequences. Code, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research.

DriveAgent-R1: Advancing VLM-based Autonomous Driving with Hybrid Thinking and Active Perception

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are advancing autonomous driving, yet their potential is constrained by myopic decision-making and passive perception, limiting reliability in complex environments. We introduce DriveAgent-R1 to tackle these challenges in long-horizon, high-level behavioral decision-making. DriveAgent-R1 features two core innovations: a Hybrid-Thinking framework that adaptively switches between efficient text-based and in-depth tool-based reasoning, and an Active Perception mechanism with a vision toolkit to proactively resolve uncertainties, thereby balancing decision-making efficiency and reliability. The agent is trained using a novel, three-stage progressive reinforcement learning strategy designed to master these hybrid capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DriveAgent-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming even leading proprietary large multimodal models, such as Claude Sonnet 4. Ablation studies validate our approach and confirm that the agent's decisions are robustly grounded in actively perceived visual evidence, paving a path toward safer and more intelligent autonomous systems.