Daily Papers

Driving world models have gained increasing attention due to their ability to model complex physical dynamics. However, their superb modeling capability is yet to be fully unleashed due to the limited video diversity in current driving datasets. We introduce DrivingDojo, the first dataset tailor-made for training interactive world models with complex driving dynamics. Our dataset features video clips with a complete set of driving maneuvers, diverse multi-agent interplay, and rich open-world driving knowledge, laying a stepping stone for future world model development. We further define an action instruction following (AIF) benchmark for world models and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dataset for generating action-controlled future predictions.

To safely navigate intricate real-world scenarios, autonomous vehicles must be able to adapt to diverse road conditions and anticipate future events. World model (WM) based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach by learning and predicting the complex dynamics of various environments. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there does not exist an accessible platform for training and testing such algorithms in sophisticated driving environments. To fill this void, we introduce CarDreamer, the first open-source learning platform designed specifically for developing WM based autonomous driving algorithms. It comprises three key components: 1) World model backbone: CarDreamer has integrated some state-of-the-art WMs, which simplifies the reproduction of RL algorithms. The backbone is decoupled from the rest and communicates using the standard Gym interface, so that users can easily integrate and test their own algorithms. 2) Built-in tasks: CarDreamer offers a comprehensive set of highly configurable driving tasks which are compatible with Gym interfaces and are equipped with empirically optimized reward functions. 3) Task development suite: This suite streamlines the creation of driving tasks, enabling easy definition of traffic flows and vehicle routes, along with automatic collection of multi-modal observation data. A visualization server allows users to trace real-time agent driving videos and performance metrics through a browser. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments using built-in tasks to evaluate the performance and potential of WMs in autonomous driving. Thanks to the richness and flexibility of CarDreamer, we also systematically study the impact of observation modality, observability, and sharing of vehicle intentions on AV safety and efficiency. All code and documents are accessible on https://github.com/ucd-dare/CarDreamer.

How can we reliably simulate future driving scenarios under a wide range of ego driving behaviors? Recent driving world models, developed exclusively on real-world driving data composed mainly of safe expert trajectories, struggle to follow hazardous or non-expert behaviors, which are rare in such data. This limitation restricts their applicability to tasks such as policy evaluation. In this work, we address this challenge by enriching real-world human demonstrations with diverse non-expert data collected from a driving simulator (e.g., CARLA), and building a controllable world model trained on this heterogeneous corpus. Starting with a video generator featuring a diffusion transformer architecture, we devise several strategies to effectively integrate conditioning signals and improve prediction controllability and fidelity. The resulting model, ReSim, enables Reliable Simulation of diverse open-world driving scenarios under various actions, including hazardous non-expert ones. To close the gap between high-fidelity simulation and applications that require reward signals to judge different actions, we introduce a Video2Reward module that estimates a reward from ReSim's simulated future. Our ReSim paradigm achieves up to 44% higher visual fidelity, improves controllability for both expert and non-expert actions by over 50%, and boosts planning and policy selection performance on NAVSIM by 2% and 25%, respectively.

Recently, two-stage fine-tuning strategies, e.g., acquiring essential driving knowledge through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and further enhancing decision-making and planning via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), have shown strong potential in advancing the knowledge-driven autonomous driving (AD) paradigm. However, the learning nature of SFT still limits the generalization of reasoning, thereby constraining the full potential of driving performance. Meanwhile, current RFT approaches are primarily applied to downstream tasks, since scene understanding is an open-ended problem where corresponding rewards are difficult to quantify. To address these limitations, we propose OpenREAD, an OPEN-ended REasoning reinforced vision-language model (VLM)-based autonomous driving (AD) framework that enables end-to-end RFT across the full spectrum from high-level reasoning to low-level trajectory planning. Specifically, we begin by constructing large-scale Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations on open-source driving-related knowledge datasets, and employ the powerful Qwen3 large language model (LLM) as the critic in RFT to quantify reasoning quality for open-ended questions during reward modeling. Extensive experiments confirm that joint end-to-end RFT yields substantial improvements in both upstream and downstream tasks, enabling OpenREAD to achieve state-of-the-art performance on reasoning and planning benchmarks.

The emergence of general human knowledge and impressive logical reasoning capacity in rapidly progressed vision-language models (VLMs) have driven increasing interest in applying VLMs to high-level autonomous driving tasks, such as scene understanding and decision-making. However, an in-depth study on the relationship between knowledge proficiency, especially essential driving expertise, and closed-loop autonomous driving performance requires further exploration. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the depth and breadth of fundamental driving knowledge on closed-loop trajectory planning and introduce WiseAD, a specialized VLM tailored for end-to-end autonomous driving capable of driving reasoning, action justification, object recognition, risk analysis, driving suggestions, and trajectory planning across diverse scenarios. We employ joint training on driving knowledge and planning datasets, enabling the model to perform knowledge-aligned trajectory planning accordingly. Extensive experiments indicate that as the diversity of driving knowledge extends, critical accidents are notably reduced, contributing 11.9% and 12.4% improvements in the driving score and route completion on the Carla closed-loop evaluations, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, WiseAD also demonstrates remarkable performance in knowledge evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets.

The Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with extensive world knowledge have revitalized autonomous driving, particularly in reasoning tasks within perceivable regions. However, when faced with perception-limited areas (dynamic or static occlusion regions), MLLMs struggle to effectively integrate perception ability with world knowledge for reasoning. These perception-limited regions can conceal crucial safety information, especially for vulnerable road users. In this paper, we propose a framework, which aims to improve autonomous driving performance under perceptionlimited conditions by enhancing the integration of perception capabilities and world knowledge. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play instruction-guided interaction module that bridges modality gaps and significantly reduces the input sequence length, allowing it to adapt effectively to multi-view video inputs. Furthermore, to better integrate world knowledge with driving-related tasks, we have collected and refined a large-scale multi-modal dataset that includes 2 million natural language QA pairs, 1.7 million grounding task data. To evaluate the model's utilization of world knowledge, we introduce an object-level risk assessment dataset comprising 200K QA pairs, where the questions necessitate multi-step reasoning leveraging world knowledge for resolution. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

We present OpenDriveVLA, a Vision-Language Action (VLA) model designed for end-to-end autonomous driving. OpenDriveVLA builds upon open-source pre-trained large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate reliable driving actions, conditioned on 3D environmental perception, ego vehicle states, and driver commands. To bridge the modality gap between driving visual representations and language embeddings, we propose a hierarchical vision-language alignment process, projecting both 2D and 3D structured visual tokens into a unified semantic space. Besides, OpenDriveVLA models the dynamic relationships between the ego vehicle, surrounding agents, and static road elements through an autoregressive agent-env-ego interaction process, ensuring both spatially and behaviorally informed trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OpenDriveVLA achieves state-of-the-art results across open-loop trajectory planning and driving-related question-answering tasks. Qualitative analyses further illustrate OpenDriveVLA's superior capability to follow high-level driving commands and robustly generate trajectories under challenging scenarios, highlighting its potential for next-generation end-to-end autonomous driving. We will release our code to facilitate further research in this domain.

Recent advancements in autonomous driving have relied on data-driven approaches, which are widely adopted but face challenges including dataset bias, overfitting, and uninterpretability. Drawing inspiration from the knowledge-driven nature of human driving, we explore the question of how to instill similar capabilities into autonomous driving systems and summarize a paradigm that integrates an interactive environment, a driver agent, as well as a memory component to address this question. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) with emergent abilities, we propose the DiLu framework, which combines a Reasoning and a Reflection module to enable the system to perform decision-making based on common-sense knowledge and evolve continuously. Extensive experiments prove DiLu's capability to accumulate experience and demonstrate a significant advantage in generalization ability over reinforcement learning-based methods. Moreover, DiLu is able to directly acquire experiences from real-world datasets which highlights its potential to be deployed on practical autonomous driving systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to leverage knowledge-driven capability in decision-making for autonomous vehicles. Through the proposed DiLu framework, LLM is strengthened to apply knowledge and to reason causally in the autonomous driving domain. Project page: https://pjlab-adg.github.io/DiLu/

Driving World Models (DWMs) have become essential for autonomous driving by enabling future scene prediction. However, existing DWMs are limited to scene generation and fail to incorporate scene understanding, which involves interpreting and reasoning about the driving environment. In this paper, we present a unified Driving World Model named HERMES. We seamlessly integrate 3D scene understanding and future scene evolution (generation) through a unified framework in driving scenarios. Specifically, HERMES leverages a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation to consolidate multi-view spatial information while preserving geometric relationships and interactions. We also introduce world queries, which incorporate world knowledge into BEV features via causal attention in the Large Language Model (LLM), enabling contextual enrichment for understanding and generation tasks. We conduct comprehensive studies on nuScenes and OmniDrive-nuScenes datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method. HERMES achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing generation error by 32.4% and improving understanding metrics such as CIDEr by 8.0%. The model and code will be publicly released at https://github.com/LMD0311/HERMES.

Recent advancements in world models have revolutionized dynamic environment simulation, allowing systems to foresee future states and assess potential actions. In autonomous driving, these capabilities help vehicles anticipate the behavior of other road users, perform risk-aware planning, accelerate training in simulation, and adapt to novel scenarios, thereby enhancing safety and reliability. Current approaches exhibit deficiencies in maintaining robust 3D geometric consistency or accumulating artifacts during occlusion handling, both critical for reliable safety assessment in autonomous navigation tasks. To address this, we introduce GeoDrive, which explicitly integrates robust 3D geometry conditions into driving world models to enhance spatial understanding and action controllability. Specifically, we first extract a 3D representation from the input frame and then obtain its 2D rendering based on the user-specified ego-car trajectory. To enable dynamic modeling, we propose a dynamic editing module during training to enhance the renderings by editing the positions of the vehicles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing models in both action accuracy and 3D spatial awareness, leading to more realistic, adaptable, and reliable scene modeling for safer autonomous driving. Additionally, our model can generalize to novel trajectories and offers interactive scene editing capabilities, such as object editing and object trajectory control.

Achieving human-like driving behaviors in complex open-world environments is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. Contemporary learning-based planning approaches such as imitation learning methods often struggle to balance competing objectives and lack of safety assurance,due to limited adaptability and inadequacy in learning complex multi-modal behaviors commonly exhibited in human planning, not to mention their strong reliance on the fallback strategy with predefined rules. We propose a novel transformer-based Diffusion Planner for closed-loop planning, which can effectively model multi-modal driving behavior and ensure trajectory quality without any rule-based refinement. Our model supports joint modeling of both prediction and planning tasks under the same architecture, enabling cooperative behaviors between vehicles. Moreover, by learning the gradient of the trajectory score function and employing a flexible classifier guidance mechanism, Diffusion Planner effectively achieves safe and adaptable planning behaviors. Evaluations on the large-scale real-world autonomous planning benchmark nuPlan and our newly collected 200-hour delivery-vehicle driving dataset demonstrate that Diffusion Planner achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop performance with robust transferability in diverse driving styles.

In autonomous driving, predicting future events in advance and evaluating the foreseeable risks empowers autonomous vehicles to better plan their actions, enhancing safety and efficiency on the road. To this end, we propose Drive-WM, the first driving world model compatible with existing end-to-end planning models. Through a joint spatial-temporal modeling facilitated by view factorization, our model generates high-fidelity multiview videos in driving scenes. Building on its powerful generation ability, we showcase the potential of applying the world model for safe driving planning for the first time. Particularly, our Drive-WM enables driving into multiple futures based on distinct driving maneuvers, and determines the optimal trajectory according to the image-based rewards. Evaluation on real-world driving datasets verifies that our method could generate high-quality, consistent, and controllable multiview videos, opening up possibilities for real-world simulations and safe planning.

Driving World Model (DWM), which focuses on predicting scene evolution during the driving process, has emerged as a promising paradigm in pursuing autonomous driving. These methods enable autonomous driving systems to better perceive, understand, and interact with dynamic driving environments. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the latest progress in DWM. We categorize existing approaches based on the modalities of the predicted scenes and summarize their specific contributions to autonomous driving. In addition, high-impact datasets and various metrics tailored to different tasks within the scope of DWM research are reviewed. Finally, we discuss the potential limitations of current research and propose future directions. This survey provides valuable insights into the development and application of DWM, fostering its broader adoption in autonomous driving. The relevant papers are collected at https://github.com/LMD0311/Awesome-World-Model.

Existing autonomous driving systems rely on onboard sensors (cameras, LiDAR, IMU, etc) for environmental perception. However, this paradigm is limited by the drive-time perception horizon and often fails under limited view scope, occlusion or extreme conditions such as darkness and rain. In contrast, human drivers are able to recall road structure even under poor visibility. To endow models with this ``recall" ability, we propose the spatial retrieval paradigm, introducing offline retrieved geographic images as an additional input. These images are easy to obtain from offline caches (e.g, Google Maps or stored autonomous driving datasets) without requiring additional sensors, making it a plug-and-play extension for existing AD tasks. For experiments, we first extend the nuScenes dataset with geographic images retrieved via Google Maps APIs and align the new data with ego-vehicle trajectories. We establish baselines across five core autonomous driving tasks: object detection, online mapping, occupancy prediction, end-to-end planning, and generative world modeling. Extensive experiments show that the extended modality could enhance the performance of certain tasks. We will open-source dataset curation code, data, and benchmarks for further study of this new autonomous driving paradigm.

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promise in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS). However, their direct application to ADS is hindered by challenges such as misunderstanding of traffic knowledge, complex road conditions, and diverse states of vehicle. To address these challenges, we propose the use of Knowledge Editing, which enables targeted modifications to a model's behavior without the need for full retraining. Meanwhile, we introduce ADS-Edit, a multimodal knowledge editing dataset specifically designed for ADS, which includes various real-world scenarios, multiple data types, and comprehensive evaluation metrics. We conduct comprehensive experiments and derive several interesting conclusions. We hope that our work will contribute to the further advancement of knowledge editing applications in the field of autonomous driving. Code and data are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

World models have become increasingly popular in acting as learned traffic simulators. Recent work has explored replacing traditional traffic simulators with world models for policy training. In this work, we explore the robustness of existing metrics to evaluate world models as traffic simulators to see if the same metrics are suitable for evaluating a world model as a pseudo-environment for policy training. Specifically, we analyze the metametric employed by the Waymo Open Sim-Agents Challenge (WOSAC) and compare world model predictions on standard scenarios where the agents are fully or partially controlled by the world model (partial replay). Furthermore, since we are interested in evaluating the ego action-conditioned world model, we extend the standard WOSAC evaluation domain to include agents that are causal to the ego vehicle. Our evaluations reveal a significant number of scenarios where top-ranking models perform well under no perturbation but fail when the ego agent is forced to replay the original trajectory. To address these cases, we propose new metrics to highlight the sensitivity of world models to uncontrollable objects and evaluate the performance of world models as pseudo-environments for policy training and analyze some state-of-the-art world models under these new metrics.

End-to-end autonomous driving has been recently seen rapid development, exerting a profound influence on both industry and academia. However, the existing work places excessive focus on ego-vehicle status as their sole learning objectives and lacks of planning-oriented understanding, which limits the robustness of the overall decision-making prcocess. In this work, we introduce DistillDrive, an end-to-end knowledge distillation-based autonomous driving model that leverages diversified instance imitation to enhance multi-mode motion feature learning. Specifically, we employ a planning model based on structured scene representations as the teacher model, leveraging its diversified planning instances as multi-objective learning targets for the end-to-end model. Moreover, we incorporate reinforcement learning to enhance the optimization of state-to-decision mappings, while utilizing generative modeling to construct planning-oriented instances, fostering intricate interactions within the latent space. We validate our model on the nuScenes and NAVSIM datasets, achieving a 50\% reduction in collision rate and a 3-point improvement in closed-loop performance compared to the baseline model. Code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/YuruiAI/DistillDrive

Exploring open-world situations in an end-to-end manner is a promising yet challenging task due to the need for strong generalization capabilities. In particular, end-to-end autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments often encounters conditions that were unfamiliar during training. In this work, we present Vision-Language Action Retrieval (VLA-R), an open-world end-to-end autonomous driving (OW-E2EAD) framework that integrates open-world perception with a novel vision-action retrieval paradigm. We leverage a frozen vision-language model for open-world detection and segmentation to obtain multi-scale, prompt-guided, and interpretable perception features without domain-specific tuning. A Q-Former bottleneck aggregates fine-grained visual representations with language-aligned visual features, bridging perception and action domains. To learn transferable driving behaviors, we introduce a vision-action contrastive learning scheme that aligns vision-language and action embeddings for effective open-world reasoning and action retrieval. Our experiments on a real-world robotic platform demonstrate strong generalization and exploratory performance in unstructured, unseen environments, even with limited data. Demo videos are provided in the supplementary material.

World models can foresee the outcomes of different actions, which is of paramount importance for autonomous driving. Nevertheless, existing driving world models still have limitations in generalization to unseen environments, prediction fidelity of critical details, and action controllability for flexible application. In this paper, we present Vista, a generalizable driving world model with high fidelity and versatile controllability. Based on a systematic diagnosis of existing methods, we introduce several key ingredients to address these limitations. To accurately predict real-world dynamics at high resolution, we propose two novel losses to promote the learning of moving instances and structural information. We also devise an effective latent replacement approach to inject historical frames as priors for coherent long-horizon rollouts. For action controllability, we incorporate a versatile set of controls from high-level intentions (command, goal point) to low-level maneuvers (trajectory, angle, and speed) through an efficient learning strategy. After large-scale training, the capabilities of Vista can seamlessly generalize to different scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that Vista outperforms the most advanced general-purpose video generator in over 70% of comparisons and surpasses the best-performing driving world model by 55% in FID and 27% in FVD. Moreover, for the first time, we utilize the capacity of Vista itself to establish a generalizable reward for real-world action evaluation without accessing the ground truth actions.

World models, especially in autonomous driving, are trending and drawing extensive attention due to their capacity for comprehending driving environments. The established world model holds immense potential for the generation of high-quality driving videos, and driving policies for safe maneuvering. However, a critical limitation in relevant research lies in its predominant focus on gaming environments or simulated settings, thereby lacking the representation of real-world driving scenarios. Therefore, we introduce DriveDreamer, a pioneering world model entirely derived from real-world driving scenarios. Regarding that modeling the world in intricate driving scenes entails an overwhelming search space, we propose harnessing the powerful diffusion model to construct a comprehensive representation of the complex environment. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage training pipeline. In the initial phase, DriveDreamer acquires a deep understanding of structured traffic constraints, while the subsequent stage equips it with the ability to anticipate future states. The proposed DriveDreamer is the first world model established from real-world driving scenarios. We instantiate DriveDreamer on the challenging nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments verify that DriveDreamer empowers precise, controllable video generation that faithfully captures the structural constraints of real-world traffic scenarios. Additionally, DriveDreamer enables the generation of realistic and reasonable driving policies, opening avenues for interaction and practical applications.

Understanding the road genome is essential to realize autonomous driving. This highly intelligent problem contains two aspects - the connection relationship of lanes, and the assignment relationship between lanes and traffic elements, where a comprehensive topology reasoning method is vacant. On one hand, previous map learning techniques struggle in deriving lane connectivity with segmentation or laneline paradigms; or prior lane topology-oriented approaches focus on centerline detection and neglect the interaction modeling. On the other hand, the traffic element to lane assignment problem is limited in the image domain, leaving how to construct the correspondence from two views an unexplored challenge. To address these issues, we present TopoNet, the first end-to-end framework capable of abstracting traffic knowledge beyond conventional perception tasks. To capture the driving scene topology, we introduce three key designs: (1) an embedding module to incorporate semantic knowledge from 2D elements into a unified feature space; (2) a curated scene graph neural network to model relationships and enable feature interaction inside the network; (3) instead of transmitting messages arbitrarily, a scene knowledge graph is devised to differentiate prior knowledge from various types of the road genome. We evaluate TopoNet on the challenging scene understanding benchmark, OpenLane-V2, where our approach outperforms all previous works by a great margin on all perceptual and topological metrics. The code is released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/TopoNet

If a Large Language Model (LLM) were to take a driving knowledge test today, would it pass? Beyond standard spatial and visual question-answering (QA) tasks on current autonomous driving benchmarks, driving knowledge tests require a complete understanding of all traffic rules, signage, and right-of-way principles. To pass this test, human drivers must discern various edge cases that rarely appear in real-world datasets. In this work, we present DriveQA, an extensive open-source text and vision-based benchmark that exhaustively covers traffic regulations and scenarios. Through our experiments using DriveQA, we show that (1) state-of-the-art LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) perform well on basic traffic rules but exhibit significant weaknesses in numerical reasoning and complex right-of-way scenarios, traffic sign variations, and spatial layouts, (2) fine-tuning on DriveQA improves accuracy across multiple categories, particularly in regulatory sign recognition and intersection decision-making, (3) controlled variations in DriveQA-V provide insights into model sensitivity to environmental factors such as lighting, perspective, distance, and weather conditions, and (4) pretraining on DriveQA enhances downstream driving task performance, leading to improved results on real-world datasets such as nuScenes and BDD, while also demonstrating that models can internalize text and synthetic traffic knowledge to generalize effectively across downstream QA tasks.

Recent end-to-end autonomous driving approaches have leveraged Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance planning capabilities in complex driving scenarios. However, VLMs are inherently trained as generalist models, lacking specialized understanding of driving-specific reasoning in 3D space and time. When applied to autonomous driving, these models struggle to establish structured spatial-temporal representations that capture geometric relationships, scene context, and motion patterns critical for safe trajectory planning. To address these limitations, we propose SGDrive, a novel framework that explicitly structures the VLM's representation learning around driving-specific knowledge hierarchies. Built upon a pre-trained VLM backbone, SGDrive decomposes driving understanding into a scene-agent-goal hierarchy that mirrors human driving cognition: drivers first perceive the overall environment (scene context), then attend to safety-critical agents and their behaviors, and finally formulate short-term goals before executing actions. This hierarchical decomposition provides the structured spatial-temporal representation that generalist VLMs lack, integrating multi-level information into a compact yet comprehensive format for trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that SGDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance among camera-only methods on both PDMS and EPDMS, validating the effectiveness of hierarchical knowledge structuring for adapting generalist VLMs to autonomous driving.

Automated driving functions increasingly rely on machine learning for tasks like perception and trajectory planning, requiring large, relevant datasets. The performance of these algorithms depends on how closely the training data matches the task. To ensure reliable functioning, it is crucial to know what is included in the dataset to assess the trained model's operational risk. We aim to enhance the safe use of machine learning in automated driving by developing a method to recognize situations that an automated vehicle has not been sufficiently trained on. This method also improves explainability by describing the dataset at a human-understandable level. We propose modeling driving data as knowledge graphs, representing driving scenes with entities and their relationships. These graphs are queried for specific sub-scene configurations to check their occurrence in the dataset. We estimate a vehicle's competence in a driving scene by considering the coverage and complexity of sub-scene configurations in the training set. Higher complexity scenes require greater coverage for high competence. We apply this method to the NuPlan dataset, modeling it with knowledge graphs and analyzing the coverage of specific driving scenes. This approach helps monitor the competence of machine learning models trained on the dataset, which is essential for trustworthy AI to be deployed in automated driving.

Recent studies have delved into constructing generalist agents for open-world embodied environments like Minecraft. Despite the encouraging results, existing efforts mainly focus on solving basic programmatic tasks, e.g., material collection and tool-crafting following the Minecraft tech-tree, treating the ObtainDiamond task as the ultimate goal. This limitation stems from the narrowly defined set of actions available to agents, requiring them to learn effective long-horizon strategies from scratch. Consequently, discovering diverse gameplay opportunities in the open world becomes challenging. In this work, we introduce ODYSSEY, a new framework that empowers Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents with open-world skills to explore the vast Minecraft world. ODYSSEY comprises three key parts: (1) An interactive agent with an open-world skill library that consists of 40 primitive skills and 183 compositional skills. (2) A fine-tuned LLaMA-3 model trained on a large question-answering dataset with 390k+ instruction entries derived from the Minecraft Wiki. (3) A new open-world benchmark includes thousands of long-term planning tasks, tens of dynamic-immediate planning tasks, and one autonomous exploration task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed ODYSSEY framework can effectively evaluate the planning and exploration capabilities of agents. All datasets, model weights, and code are publicly available to motivate future research on more advanced autonomous agent solutions.

The advent of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating powerful reasoning abilities for high-level behavior planning tasks. However, existing methods are often constrained by a passive perception paradigm, relying solely on text-based reasoning. This passivity restricts the model's capacity to actively seek crucial visual evidence when faced with uncertainty. To address this, we introduce DriveAgent-R1, the first autonomous driving agent capable of active perception for planning. In complex scenarios, DriveAgent-R1 proactively invokes tools to perform visual reasoning, firmly grounding its decisions in visual evidence, thereby enhancing both interpretability and reliability. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid thinking framework, inspired by human driver cognitive patterns, allowing the agent to adaptively switch between efficient text-only reasoning and robust tool-augmented visual reasoning based on scene complexity. This capability is cultivated through a three-stage progressive training strategy, featuring a core Cascaded Reinforcement Learning (Cascaded RL) phase. Extensive experiments on the Drive-Internal dataset, which is rich in long-tail scenarios, and the public nuScenes dataset show that, with only 3B parameters, DriveAgent-R1 achieves competitive performance comparable to top closed model systems such as GPT-5 and to human driving proficiency while remaining deployment-friendly, offering a proven path toward building more intelligent autonomous driving systems.

Recent endeavors towards directly using large language models (LLMs) as agent models to execute interactive planning tasks have shown commendable results. Despite their achievements, however, they still struggle with brainless trial-and-error in global planning and generating hallucinatory actions in local planning due to their poor understanding of the ''real'' physical world. Imitating humans' mental world knowledge model which provides global prior knowledge before the task and maintains local dynamic knowledge during the task, in this paper, we introduce parametric World Knowledge Model (WKM) to facilitate agent planning. Concretely, we steer the agent model to self-synthesize knowledge from both expert and sampled trajectories. Then we develop WKM, providing prior task knowledge to guide the global planning and dynamic state knowledge to assist the local planning. Experimental results on three complex real-world simulated datasets with three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, Mistral-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama-3-8B, demonstrate that our method can achieve superior performance compared to various strong baselines. Besides, we analyze to illustrate that our WKM can effectively alleviate the blind trial-and-error and hallucinatory action issues, providing strong support for the agent's understanding of the world. Other interesting findings include: 1) our instance-level task knowledge can generalize better to unseen tasks, 2) weak WKM can guide strong agent model planning, and 3) unified WKM training has promising potential for further development. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WKM.

End-to-end autonomous driving research currently faces a critical challenge in bridging the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop deployment. Current approaches are trained to predict trajectories in an open-loop environment, which struggle with quick reactions to other agents in closed-loop environments and risk generating kinematically infeasible plans due to the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving. In this paper, we introduce Hydra-NeXt, a novel multi-branch planning framework that unifies trajectory prediction, control prediction, and a trajectory refinement network in one model. Unlike current open-loop trajectory prediction models that only handle general-case planning, Hydra-NeXt further utilizes a control decoder to focus on short-term actions, which enables faster responses to dynamic situations and reactive agents. Moreover, we propose the Trajectory Refinement module to augment and refine the planning decisions by effectively adhering to kinematic constraints in closed-loop environments. This unified approach bridges the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving, demonstrating superior performance of 65.89 Driving Score (DS) and 48.20% Success Rate (SR) on the Bench2Drive dataset without relying on external experts for data collection. Hydra-NeXt surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 22.98 DS and 17.49 SR, marking a significant advancement in autonomous driving. Code will be available at https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/Hydra-NeXt.

Autonomous driving technology, a catalyst for revolutionizing transportation and urban mobility, has the tend to transition from rule-based systems to data-driven strategies. Traditional module-based systems are constrained by cumulative errors among cascaded modules and inflexible pre-set rules. In contrast, end-to-end autonomous driving systems have the potential to avoid error accumulation due to their fully data-driven training process, although they often lack transparency due to their "black box" nature, complicating the validation and traceability of decisions. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated abilities including understanding context, logical reasoning, and generating answers. A natural thought is to utilize these abilities to empower autonomous driving. By combining LLM with foundation vision models, it could open the door to open-world understanding, reasoning, and few-shot learning, which current autonomous driving systems are lacking. In this paper, we systematically review a research line about Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving (LLM4AD). This study evaluates the current state of technological advancements, distinctly outlining the principal challenges and prospective directions for the field. For the convenience of researchers in academia and industry, we provide real-time updates on the latest advances in the field as well as relevant open-source resources via the designated link: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/Awesome-LLM4AD.

The autonomous driving community has witnessed a rapid growth in approaches that embrace an end-to-end algorithm framework, utilizing raw sensor input to generate vehicle motion plans, instead of concentrating on individual tasks such as detection and motion prediction. End-to-end systems, in comparison to modular pipelines, benefit from joint feature optimization for perception and planning. This field has flourished due to the availability of large-scale datasets, closed-loop evaluation, and the increasing need for autonomous driving algorithms to perform effectively in challenging scenarios. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive analysis of more than 250 papers, covering the motivation, roadmap, methodology, challenges, and future trends in end-to-end autonomous driving. We delve into several critical challenges, including multi-modality, interpretability, causal confusion, robustness, and world models, amongst others. Additionally, we discuss current advancements in foundation models and visual pre-training, as well as how to incorporate these techniques within the end-to-end driving framework. To facilitate future research, we maintain an active repository that contains up-to-date links to relevant literature and open-source projects at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/End-to-end-Autonomous-Driving.

Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

Achieving both realism and controllability in interactive closed-loop traffic simulation remains a key challenge in autonomous driving. Data-driven simulation methods reproduce realistic trajectories but suffer from covariate shift in closed-loop deployment, compounded by simplified dynamics models that further reduce reliability. Conversely, physics-based simulation methods enhance reliable and controllable closed-loop interactions but often lack expert demonstrations, compromising realism. To address these challenges, we introduce a dual-stage AV-centered simulation framework that conducts open-loop imitation learning pre-training in a data-driven simulator to capture trajectory-level realism and multimodality, followed by closed-loop reinforcement learning fine-tuning in a physics-based simulator to enhance controllability and mitigate covariate shift. In the fine-tuning stage, we propose RIFT, a simple yet effective closed-loop RL fine-tuning strategy that preserves the trajectory-level multimodality through a GRPO-style group-relative advantage formulation, while enhancing controllability and training stability by replacing KL regularization with the dual-clip mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFT significantly improves the realism and controllability of generated traffic scenarios, providing a robust platform for evaluating autonomous vehicle performance in diverse and interactive scenarios.

Recently, various studies have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to help decision-making and planning in environments, and try to align the LLMs' knowledge with the world conditions. Nonetheless, the capacity of LLMs to continuously acquire environmental knowledge and adapt in an open world remains uncertain. In this paper, we propose an approach to spur LLMs to explore the open world, gather experiences, and learn to improve their task-solving capabilities. In this approach, a multi-round feedback-revision mechanism is utilized to encourage LLMs to actively select appropriate revision actions guided by feedback information from the environment. This facilitates exploration and enhances the model's performance. Besides, we integrate sub-task relabeling to assist LLMs in maintaining consistency in sub-task planning and help the model learn the combinatorial nature between tasks, enabling it to complete a wider range of tasks through training based on the acquired exploration experiences. By evaluation in Minecraft, an open-ended sandbox world, we demonstrate that our approach LLaMA-Rider enhances the efficiency of the LLM in exploring the environment, and effectively improves the LLM's ability to accomplish more tasks through fine-tuning with merely 1.3k instances of collected data, showing minimal training costs compared to the baseline using reinforcement learning.

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to generate safe and plausible planning policies from raw sensor input. Driving world models have shown great potential in learning rich representations by predicting the future evolution of a driving scene. However, existing driving world models primarily focus on visual scene representation, and motion representation is not explicitly designed to be planner-shared and inheritable, leaving a schism between the optimization of visual scene generation and the requirements of precise motion planning. We present WorldDrive, a holistic framework that couples scene generation and real-time planning via unifying vision and motion representation. We first introduce a Trajectory-aware Driving World Model, which conditions on a trajectory vocabulary to enforce consistency between visual dynamics and motion intentions, enabling the generation of diverse and plausible future scenes conditioned on a specific trajectory. We transfer the vision and motion encoders to a downstream Multi-modal Planner, ensuring the driving policy operates on mature representations pre-optimized by scene generation. A simple interaction between motion representation, visual representation, and ego status can generate high-quality, multi-modal trajectories. Furthermore, to exploit the world model's foresight, we propose a Future-aware Rewarder, which distills future latent representation from the frozen world model to evaluate and select optimal trajectories in real-time. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM, NAVSIM-v2, and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that WorldDrive achieves leading planning performance among vision-only methods while maintaining high-fidelity action-controlled video generation capabilities, providing strong evidence for the effectiveness of unifying vision and motion representation for robust autonomous driving.

Video generation models, as one form of world models, have emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers in AI, promising agents the ability to imagine the future by modeling the temporal evolution of complex scenes. In autonomous driving, this vision gives rise to driving world models: generative simulators that imagine ego and agent futures, enabling scalable simulation, safe testing of corner cases, and rich synthetic data generation. Yet, despite fast-growing research activity, the field lacks a rigorous benchmark to measure progress and guide priorities. Existing evaluations remain limited: generic video metrics overlook safety-critical imaging factors; trajectory plausibility is rarely quantified; temporal and agent-level consistency is neglected; and controllability with respect to ego conditioning is ignored. Moreover, current datasets fail to cover the diversity of conditions required for real-world deployment. To address these gaps, we present DrivingGen, the first comprehensive benchmark for generative driving world models. DrivingGen combines a diverse evaluation dataset curated from both driving datasets and internet-scale video sources, spanning varied weather, time of day, geographic regions, and complex maneuvers, with a suite of new metrics that jointly assess visual realism, trajectory plausibility, temporal coherence, and controllability. Benchmarking 14 state-of-the-art models reveals clear trade-offs: general models look better but break physics, while driving-specific ones capture motion realistically but lag in visual quality. DrivingGen offers a unified evaluation framework to foster reliable, controllable, and deployable driving world models, enabling scalable simulation, planning, and data-driven decision-making.

Most self-driving systems rely on hand-coded perception outputs and engineered driving rules. Learning directly from human driving data with an end-to-end method can allow for a training architecture that is simpler and scales well with compute and data. In this work, we propose an end-to-end training architecture that uses real driving data to train a driving policy in an on-policy simulator. We show two different methods of simulation, one with reprojective simulation and one with a learned world model. We show that both methods can be used to train a policy that learns driving behavior without any hand-coded driving rules. We evaluate the performance of these policies in a closed-loop simulation and when deployed in a real-world advanced driver-assistance system.

Achieving fully autonomous driving systems requires learning rational decisions in a wide span of scenarios, including safety-critical and out-of-distribution ones. However, such cases are underrepresented in real-world corpus collected by human experts. To complement for the lack of data diversity, we introduce a novel and scalable simulation framework capable of synthesizing massive unseen states upon existing driving logs. Our pipeline utilizes advanced neural rendering with a reactive environment to generate high-fidelity multi-view observations controlled by the perturbed ego trajectory. Furthermore, we develop a pseudo-expert trajectory generation mechanism for these newly simulated states to provide action supervision. Upon the synthesized data, we find that a simple co-training strategy on both real-world and simulated samples can lead to significant improvements in both robustness and generalization for various planning methods on challenging real-world benchmarks, up to +6.8 EPDMS on navhard and +2.9 on navtest. More importantly, such policy improvement scales smoothly by increasing simulation data only, even without extra real-world data streaming in. We further reveal several crucial findings of such a sim-real learning system, which we term SimScale, including the design of pseudo-experts and the scaling properties for different policy architectures. Our simulation data and code would be released.

For autonomous vehicles, safe navigation in complex environments depends on handling a broad range of diverse and rare driving scenarios. Simulation- and scenario-based testing have emerged as key approaches to development and validation of autonomous driving systems. Traditional scenario generation relies on rule-based systems, knowledge-driven models, and data-driven synthesis, often producing limited diversity and unrealistic safety-critical cases. With the emergence of foundation models, which represent a new generation of pre-trained, general-purpose AI models, developers can process heterogeneous inputs (e.g., natural language, sensor data, HD maps, and control actions), enabling the synthesis and interpretation of complex driving scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a survey about the application of foundation models for scenario generation and scenario analysis in autonomous driving (as of May 2025). Our survey presents a unified taxonomy that includes large language models, vision-language models, multimodal large language models, diffusion models, and world models for the generation and analysis of autonomous driving scenarios. In addition, we review the methodologies, open-source datasets, simulation platforms, and benchmark challenges, and we examine the evaluation metrics tailored explicitly to scenario generation and analysis. Finally, the survey concludes by highlighting the open challenges and research questions, and outlining promising future research directions. All reviewed papers are listed in a continuously maintained repository, which contains supplementary materials and is available at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/FM-for-Scenario-Generation-Analysis.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in world models, which primarily aim to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between an agent's actions and the evolving environment. However, existing approaches often suffer from tight runtime coupling or depend on offline reward signals, resulting in substantial inference overhead or hindering end-to-end optimization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce WPT, a World-to-Policy Transfer training paradigm that enables online distillation under the guidance of an end-to-end world model. Specifically, we develop a trainable reward model that infuses world knowledge into a teacher policy by aligning candidate trajectories with the future dynamics predicted by the world model. Subsequently, we propose policy distillation and world reward distillation to transfer the teacher's reasoning ability into a lightweight student policy, enhancing planning performance while preserving real-time deployability. Extensive experiments on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks show that our WPT achieves state-of-the-art performance with a simple policy architecture: it attains a 0.11 collision rate (open-loop) and achieves a 79.23 driving score (closed-loop) surpassing both world-model-based and imitation-learning methods in accuracy and safety. Moreover, the student sustains up to 4.9x faster inference, while retaining most of the gains.

OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 achieve or even surpass human expert-level performance in complex domains like mathematics and science, with reinforcement learning (RL) and reasoning playing a crucial role. In autonomous driving, recent end-to-end models have greatly improved planning performance but still struggle with long-tailed problems due to limited common sense and reasoning abilities. Some studies integrate vision-language models (VLMs) into autonomous driving, but they typically rely on pre-trained models with simple supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on driving data, without further exploration of training strategies or optimizations specifically tailored for planning. In this paper, we propose AlphaDrive, a RL and reasoning framework for VLMs in autonomous driving. AlphaDrive introduces four GRPO-based RL rewards tailored for planning and employs a two-stage planning reasoning training strategy that combines SFT with RL. As a result, AlphaDrive significantly improves both planning performance and training efficiency compared to using only SFT or without reasoning. Moreover, we are also excited to discover that, following RL training, AlphaDrive exhibits some emergent multimodal planning capabilities, which is critical for improving driving safety and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, AlphaDrive is the first to integrate GRPO-based RL with planning reasoning into autonomous driving. Code will be released to facilitate future research.

Building a general-purpose agent is a long-standing vision in the field of artificial intelligence. Existing agents have made remarkable progress in many domains, yet they still struggle to complete long-horizon tasks in an open world. We attribute this to the lack of necessary world knowledge and multimodal experience that can guide agents through a variety of long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Multimodal Memory module to address the above challenges. It 1) transforms knowledge into Hierarchical Directed Knowledge Graph that allows agents to explicitly represent and learn world knowledge, and 2) summarises historical information into Abstracted Multimodal Experience Pool that provide agents with rich references for in-context learning. On top of the Hybrid Multimodal Memory module, a multimodal agent, Optimus-1, is constructed with dedicated Knowledge-guided Planner and Experience-Driven Reflector, contributing to a better planning and reflection in the face of long-horizon tasks in Minecraft. Extensive experimental results show that Optimus-1 significantly outperforms all existing agents on challenging long-horizon task benchmarks, and exhibits near human-level performance on many tasks. In addition, we introduce various Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as the backbone of Optimus-1. Experimental results show that Optimus-1 exhibits strong generalization with the help of the Hybrid Multimodal Memory module, outperforming the GPT-4V baseline on many tasks.

Despite significant recent progress in the field of autonomous driving, modern methods still struggle and can incur serious accidents when encountering long-tail unforeseen events and challenging urban scenarios. On the one hand, large language models (LLM) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities that approach "Artificial General Intelligence". On the other hand, previous autonomous driving methods tend to rely on limited-format inputs (e.g. sensor data and navigation waypoints), restricting the vehicle's ability to understand language information and interact with humans. To this end, this paper introduces LMDrive, a novel language-guided, end-to-end, closed-loop autonomous driving framework. LMDrive uniquely processes and integrates multi-modal sensor data with natural language instructions, enabling interaction with humans and navigation software in realistic instructional settings. To facilitate further research in language-based closed-loop autonomous driving, we also publicly release the corresponding dataset which includes approximately 64K instruction-following data clips, and the LangAuto benchmark that tests the system's ability to handle complex instructions and challenging driving scenarios. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted to demonstrate LMDrive's effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, we're the very first work to leverage LLMs for closed-loop end-to-end autonomous driving. Codes can be found at https://github.com/opendilab/LMDrive

Closed-loop simulation is essential for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Contemporary sensor simulation methods, such as NeRF and 3DGS, rely predominantly on conditions closely aligned with training data distributions, which are largely confined to forward-driving scenarios. Consequently, these methods face limitations when rendering complex maneuvers (e.g., lane change, acceleration, deceleration). Recent advancements in autonomous-driving world models have demonstrated the potential to generate diverse driving videos. However, these approaches remain constrained to 2D video generation, inherently lacking the spatiotemporal coherence required to capture intricacies of dynamic driving environments. In this paper, we introduce DriveDreamer4D, which enhances 4D driving scene representation leveraging world model priors. Specifically, we utilize the world model as a data machine to synthesize novel trajectory videos based on real-world driving data. Notably, we explicitly leverage structured conditions to control the spatial-temporal consistency of foreground and background elements, thus the generated data adheres closely to traffic constraints. To our knowledge, DriveDreamer4D is the first to utilize video generation models for improving 4D reconstruction in driving scenarios. Experimental results reveal that DriveDreamer4D significantly enhances generation quality under novel trajectory views, achieving a relative improvement in FID by 24.5%, 39.0%, and 10.5% compared to PVG, S3Gaussian, and Deformable-GS. Moreover, DriveDreamer4D markedly enhances the spatiotemporal coherence of driving agents, which is verified by a comprehensive user study and the relative increases of 20.3%, 42.0%, and 13.7% in the NTA-IoU metric.

Autonomous Driving (AD) systems have made notable progress, but their performance in long-tail, safety-critical scenarios remains limited. These rare cases contribute a disproportionate number of accidents. Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have strong reasoning abilities and offer a potential solution, but their effectiveness is limited by the lack of high-quality data and inefficient learning in such conditions. To address these challenges, we propose CoReVLA, a continual learning end-to-end autonomous driving framework that improves the performance in long-tail scenarios through a dual-stage process of data Collection and behavior Refinement. First, the model is jointly fine-tuned on a mixture of open-source driving QA datasets, allowing it to acquire a foundational understanding of driving scenarios. Next, CoReVLA is deployed within the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) simulation platform, where driver takeover data is collected from real-time interactions. Each takeover indicates a long-tail scenario that CoReVLA fails to handle reliably. Finally, the model is refined via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), allowing it to learn directly from human preferences and thereby avoid reward hacking caused by manually designed rewards. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop experiments demonstrate that the proposed CoReVLA model can accurately perceive driving scenarios and make appropriate decisions. On the Bench2Drive benchmark, CoReVLA achieves a Driving Score (DS) of 72.18 and a Success Rate (SR) of 50%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 7.96 DS and 15% SR under long-tail, safety-critical scenarios. Furthermore, case studies demonstrate the model's ability to continually improve its performance in similar failure-prone scenarios by leveraging past takeover experiences. All codea and preprocessed datasets are available at: https://github.com/FanGShiYuu/CoReVLA

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) each show promise in addressing decision-making challenges in autonomous driving, DRL often suffers from high sample complexity, while LLMs have difficulty ensuring real-time decision making. To address these limitations, we propose TeLL-Drive, a hybrid framework that integrates a Teacher LLM to guide an attention-based Student DRL policy. By incorporating risk metrics, historical scenario retrieval, and domain heuristics into context-rich prompts, the LLM produces high-level driving strategies through chain-of-thought reasoning. A self-attention mechanism then fuses these strategies with the DRL agent's exploration, accelerating policy convergence and boosting robustness across diverse driving conditions. The experimental results, evaluated across multiple traffic scenarios, show that TeLL-Drive outperforms existing baseline methods, including other LLM-based approaches, in terms of success rates, average returns, and real-time feasibility. Ablation studies underscore the importance of each model component, especially the synergy between the attention mechanism and LLM-driven guidance. Finally, we build a virtual-real fusion experimental platform to verify the real-time performance, robustness, and reliability of the algorithm running on real vehicles through vehicle-in-loop experiments.

The availability of representative datasets is an essential prerequisite for many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, in real life applications these models often encounter scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. There are various reasons for the absence of sufficient data, ranging from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable usage of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is still a tremendous challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches. Knowledge augmented machine learning approaches offer the possibility of compensating for deficiencies, errors, or ambiguities in the data, thus increasing the generalization capability of the applied models. Even more, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-driven models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories knowledge integration, extraction and conformity. In particular, we address the application of the presented methods in the field of autonomous driving.

Existing end-to-end autonomous driving (AD) algorithms typically follow the Imitation Learning (IL) paradigm, which faces challenges such as causal confusion and the open-loop gap. In this work, we establish a 3DGS-based closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) training paradigm. By leveraging 3DGS techniques, we construct a photorealistic digital replica of the real physical world, enabling the AD policy to extensively explore the state space and learn to handle out-of-distribution scenarios through large-scale trial and error. To enhance safety, we design specialized rewards that guide the policy to effectively respond to safety-critical events and understand real-world causal relationships. For better alignment with human driving behavior, IL is incorporated into RL training as a regularization term. We introduce a closed-loop evaluation benchmark consisting of diverse, previously unseen 3DGS environments. Compared to IL-based methods, RAD achieves stronger performance in most closed-loop metrics, especially 3x lower collision rate. Abundant closed-loop results are presented at https://hgao-cv.github.io/RAD.

Controllable scene generation could reduce the cost of diverse data collection substantially for autonomous driving. Prior works formulate the traffic layout generation as predictive progress, either by denoising entire sequences at once or by iteratively predicting the next frame. However, full sequence denoising hinders online reaction, while the latter's short-sighted next-frame prediction lacks precise goal-state guidance. Further, the learned model struggles to generate complex or challenging scenarios due to a large number of safe and ordinal driving behaviors from open datasets. To overcome these, we introduce Nexus, a decoupled scene generation framework that improves reactivity and goal conditioning by simulating both ordinal and challenging scenarios from fine-grained tokens with independent noise states. At the core of the decoupled pipeline is the integration of a partial noise-masking training strategy and a noise-aware schedule that ensures timely environmental updates throughout the denoising process. To complement challenging scenario generation, we collect a dataset consisting of complex corner cases. It covers 540 hours of simulated data, including high-risk interactions such as cut-in, sudden braking, and collision. Nexus achieves superior generation realism while preserving reactivity and goal orientation, with a 40% reduction in displacement error. We further demonstrate that Nexus improves closed-loop planning by 20% through data augmentation and showcase its capability in safety-critical data generation.

Human-level driving is an ultimate goal of autonomous driving. Conventional approaches formulate autonomous driving as a perception-prediction-planning framework, yet their systems do not capitalize on the inherent reasoning ability and experiential knowledge of humans. In this paper, we propose a fundamental paradigm shift from current pipelines, exploiting Large Language Models (LLMs) as a cognitive agent to integrate human-like intelligence into autonomous driving systems. Our approach, termed Agent-Driver, transforms the traditional autonomous driving pipeline by introducing a versatile tool library accessible via function calls, a cognitive memory of common sense and experiential knowledge for decision-making, and a reasoning engine capable of chain-of-thought reasoning, task planning, motion planning, and self-reflection. Powered by LLMs, our Agent-Driver is endowed with intuitive common sense and robust reasoning capabilities, thus enabling a more nuanced, human-like approach to autonomous driving. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments substantiate that our Agent-Driver significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art driving methods by a large margin. Our approach also demonstrates superior interpretability and few-shot learning ability to these methods. Code will be released.

Reinforcement Learning is a highly active research field with promising advancements. In the field of autonomous driving, however, often very simple scenarios are being examined. Common approaches use non-interpretable control commands as the action space and unstructured reward designs which lack structure. In this work, we introduce Informed Reinforcement Learning, where a structured rulebook is integrated as a knowledge source. We learn trajectories and asses them with a situation-aware reward design, leading to a dynamic reward which allows the agent to learn situations which require controlled traffic rule exceptions. Our method is applicable to arbitrary RL models. We successfully demonstrate high completion rates of complex scenarios with recent model-based agents.

We present TartanDrive, a large scale dataset for learning dynamics models for off-road driving. We collected a dataset of roughly 200,000 off-road driving interactions on a modified Yamaha Viking ATV with seven unique sensing modalities in diverse terrains. To the authors' knowledge, this is the largest real-world multi-modal off-road driving dataset, both in terms of number of interactions and sensing modalities. We also benchmark several state-of-the-art methods for model-based reinforcement learning from high-dimensional observations on this dataset. We find that extending these models to multi-modality leads to significant performance on off-road dynamics prediction, especially in more challenging terrains. We also identify some shortcomings with current neural network architectures for the off-road driving task. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/castacks/tartan_drive.

Understanding drivers' decision-making is crucial for road safety. Although predicting the ego-vehicle's path is valuable for driver-assistance systems, existing methods mainly focus on external factors like other vehicles' motions, often neglecting the driver's attention and intent. To address this gap, we infer the ego-trajectory by integrating the driver's gaze and the surrounding scene. We introduce RouteFormer, a novel multimodal ego-trajectory prediction network combining GPS data, environmental context, and the driver's field-of-view, comprising first-person video and gaze fixations. We also present the Path Complexity Index (PCI), a new metric for trajectory complexity that enables a more nuanced evaluation of challenging scenarios. To tackle data scarcity and enhance diversity, we introduce GEM, a comprehensive dataset of urban driving scenarios enriched with synchronized driver field-of-view and gaze data. Extensive evaluations on GEM and DR(eye)VE demonstrate that RouteFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in prediction accuracy across diverse conditions. Ablation studies reveal that incorporating driver field-of-view data yields significantly better average displacement error, especially in challenging scenarios with high PCI scores, underscoring the importance of modeling driver attention. All data and code are available at https://meakbiyik.github.io/routeformer.

Off-road autonomous driving poses significant challenges such as navigating unmapped, variable terrain with uncertain and diverse dynamics. Addressing these challenges requires effective long-horizon planning and adaptable control. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising solution by learning control policies directly from interaction. However, because off-road driving is a long-horizon task with low-signal rewards, standard RL methods are challenging to apply in this setting. We introduce TADPO, a novel policy gradient formulation that extends Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), leveraging off-policy trajectories for teacher guidance and on-policy trajectories for student exploration. Building on this, we develop a vision-based, end-to-end RL system for high-speed off-road driving, capable of navigating extreme slopes and obstacle-rich terrain. We demonstrate our performance in simulation and, importantly, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a full-scale off-road vehicle. To our knowledge, this work represents the first deployment of RL-based policies on a full-scale off-road platform.

With the rise of vision-language models (VLM), their application for autonomous driving (VLM4AD) has gained significant attention. Meanwhile, in autonomous driving, closed-loop evaluation has become widely recognized as a more reliable validation method than open-loop evaluation, as it can evaluate the performance of the model under cumulative errors and out-of-distribution inputs. However, existing VLM4AD benchmarks evaluate the model`s scene understanding ability under open-loop, i.e., via static question-answer (QA) dataset. This kind of evaluation fails to assess the VLMs performance under out-of-distribution states rarely appeared in the human collected datasets.To this end, we present Bench2Drive-VL, an extension of Bench2Drive that brings closed-loop evaluation to VLM-based driving, which introduces: (1) DriveCommenter, a closed-loop generator that automatically generates diverse, behavior-grounded question-answer pairs for all driving situations in CARLA,including severe off-route and off-road deviations previously unassessable in simulation. (2) A unified protocol and interface that allows modern VLMs to be directly plugged into the Bench2Drive closed-loop environment to compare with traditional agents. (3) A flexible reasoning and control framework, supporting multi-format visual inputs and configurable graph-based chain-of-thought execution. (4) A complete development ecosystem. Together, these components form a comprehensive closed-loop benchmark for VLM4AD. All codes and annotated datasets are open sourced.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in their integration into autonomous systems for reasoning-driven perception, planning, and decision-making. However, evaluating and training such agentic AI models remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale, structured, and safety-critical benchmarks. This paper introduces AgentDrive, an open benchmark dataset containing 300,000 LLM-generated driving scenarios designed for training, fine-tuning, and evaluating autonomous agents under diverse conditions. AgentDrive formalizes a factorized scenario space across seven orthogonal axes: scenario type, driver behavior, environment, road layout, objective, difficulty, and traffic density. An LLM-driven prompt-to-JSON pipeline generates semantically rich, simulation-ready specifications that are validated against physical and schema constraints. Each scenario undergoes simulation rollouts, surrogate safety metric computation, and rule-based outcome labeling. To complement simulation-based evaluation, we introduce AgentDrive-MCQ, a 100,000-question multiple-choice benchmark spanning five reasoning dimensions: physics, policy, hybrid, scenario, and comparative reasoning. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of fifty leading LLMs on AgentDrive-MCQ. Results show that while proprietary frontier models perform best in contextual and policy reasoning, advanced open models are rapidly closing the gap in structured and physics-grounded reasoning. We release the AgentDrive dataset, AgentDrive-MCQ benchmark, evaluation code, and related materials at https://github.com/maferrag/AgentDrive

Achieving human-like planning and control with multimodal observations in an open world is a key milestone for more functional generalist agents. Existing approaches can handle certain long-horizon tasks in an open world. However, they still struggle when the number of open-world tasks could potentially be infinite and lack the capability to progressively enhance task completion as game time progresses. We introduce JARVIS-1, an open-world agent that can perceive multimodal input (visual observations and human instructions), generate sophisticated plans, and perform embodied control, all within the popular yet challenging open-world Minecraft universe. Specifically, we develop JARVIS-1 on top of pre-trained multimodal language models, which map visual observations and textual instructions to plans. The plans will be ultimately dispatched to the goal-conditioned controllers. We outfit JARVIS-1 with a multimodal memory, which facilitates planning using both pre-trained knowledge and its actual game survival experiences. In our experiments, JARVIS-1 exhibits nearly perfect performances across over 200 varying tasks from the Minecraft Universe Benchmark, ranging from entry to intermediate levels. JARVIS-1 has achieved a completion rate of 12.5% in the long-horizon diamond pickaxe task. This represents a significant increase up to 5 times compared to previous records. Furthermore, we show that JARVIS-1 is able to self-improve following a life-long learning paradigm thanks to multimodal memory, sparking a more general intelligence and improved autonomy. The project page is available at https://craftjarvis-jarvis1.github.io.

Vision-Language Models (VLM) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, showing promise for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Chain-of-Thought (CoT), as VLM's widely used reasoning strategy, is facing critical challenges. Existing textual CoT has a large gap between text semantic space and trajectory physical space. Although the recent approach utilizes future image to replace text as CoT process, it lacks clear planning-oriented objective guidance to generate images with accurate scene evolution. To address these, we innovatively propose MindDriver, a progressive multimodal reasoning framework that enables VLM to imitate human-like progressive thinking for autonomous driving. MindDriver presents semantic understanding, semantic-to-physical space imagination, and physical-space trajectory planning. To achieve aligned reasoning processes in MindDriver, we develop a feedback-guided automatic data annotation pipeline to generate aligned multimodal reasoning training data. Furthermore, we develop a progressive reinforcement fine-tuning method to optimize the alignment through progressive high- level reward-based learning. MindDriver demonstrates superior performance in both nuScences open-loop and Bench2Drive closed-loop evaluation. Codes are available at https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/MindDriver.

Most end-to-end autonomous driving methods rely on imitation learning from single expert demonstrations, often leading to conservative and homogeneous behaviors that limit generalization in complex real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose DIVER, an end-to-end driving framework that integrates reinforcement learning with diffusion-based generation to produce diverse and feasible trajectories. At the core of DIVER lies a reinforced diffusion-based generation mechanism. First, the model conditions on map elements and surrounding agents to generate multiple reference trajectories from a single ground-truth trajectory, alleviating the limitations of imitation learning that arise from relying solely on single expert demonstrations. Second, reinforcement learning is employed to guide the diffusion process, where reward-based supervision enforces safety and diversity constraints on the generated trajectories, thereby enhancing their practicality and generalization capability. Furthermore, to address the limitations of L2-based open-loop metrics in capturing trajectory diversity, we propose a novel Diversity metric to evaluate the diversity of multi-mode predictions.Extensive experiments on the closed-loop NAVSIM and Bench2Drive benchmarks, as well as the open-loop nuScenes dataset, demonstrate that DIVER significantly improves trajectory diversity, effectively addressing the mode collapse problem inherent in imitation learning.

We present ReinDriveGen, a framework that enables full controllability over dynamic driving scenes, allowing users to freely edit actor trajectories to simulate safety-critical corner cases such as front-vehicle collisions, drifting cars, vehicles spinning out of control, pedestrians jaywalking, and cyclists cutting across lanes. Our approach constructs a dynamic 3D point cloud scene from multi-frame LiDAR data, introduces a vehicle completion module to reconstruct full 360° geometry from partial observations, and renders the edited scene into 2D condition images that guide a video diffusion model to synthesize realistic driving videos. Since such edited scenarios inevitably fall outside the training distribution, we further propose an RL-based post-training strategy with a pairwise preference model and a pairwise reward mechanism, enabling robust quality improvement under out-of-distribution conditions without ground-truth supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReinDriveGen outperforms existing approaches on edited driving scenarios and achieves state-of-the-art results on novel ego viewpoint synthesis.

Autonomous driving (AD) systems struggle in long-tail scenarios due to limited world knowledge and weak visual dynamic modeling. Existing vision-language-action (VLA)-based methods cannot leverage unlabeled videos for visual causal learning, while world model-based methods lack reasoning capabilities from large language models. In this paper, we construct multiple specialized datasets providing reasoning and planning annotations for complex scenarios. Then, a unified Understanding-Generation-Planning framework, named UniUGP, is proposed to synergize scene reasoning, future video generation, and trajectory planning through a hybrid expert architecture. By integrating pre-trained VLMs and video generation models, UniUGP leverages visual dynamics and semantic reasoning to enhance planning performance. Taking multi-frame observations and language instructions as input, it produces interpretable chain-of-thought reasoning, physically consistent trajectories, and coherent future videos. We introduce a four-stage training strategy that progressively builds these capabilities across multiple existing AD datasets, along with the proposed specialized datasets. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in perception, reasoning, and decision-making, with superior generalization to challenging long-tail situations.

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to build a fully differentiable system that takes raw sensor data as inputs and directly outputs the planned trajectory or control signals of the ego vehicle. State-of-the-art methods usually follow the `Teacher-Student' paradigm. The Teacher model uses privileged information (ground-truth states of surrounding agents and map elements) to learn the driving strategy. The student model only has access to raw sensor data and conducts behavior cloning on the data collected by the teacher model. By eliminating the noise of the perception part during planning learning, state-of-the-art works could achieve better performance with significantly less data compared to those coupled ones. However, under the current Teacher-Student paradigm, the student model still needs to learn a planning head from scratch, which could be challenging due to the redundant and noisy nature of raw sensor inputs and the casual confusion issue of behavior cloning. In this work, we aim to explore the possibility of directly adopting the strong teacher model to conduct planning while letting the student model focus more on the perception part. We find that even equipped with a SOTA perception model, directly letting the student model learn the required inputs of the teacher model leads to poor driving performance, which comes from the large distribution gap between predicted privileged inputs and the ground-truth. To this end, we propose DriveAdapter, which employs adapters with the feature alignment objective function between the student (perception) and teacher (planning) modules. Additionally, since the pure learning-based teacher model itself is imperfect and occasionally breaks safety rules, we propose a method of action-guided feature learning with a mask for those imperfect teacher features to further inject the priors of hand-crafted rules into the learning process.

In real-world domains such as self-driving, generalization to rare scenarios remains a fundamental challenge. To address this, we introduce a new dataset designed for end-to-end driving that focuses on long-tail driving events. We provide multi-view video data, trajectories, high-level instructions, and detailed reasoning traces, facilitating in-context learning and few-shot generalization. The resulting benchmark for multimodal models, such as VLMs and VLAs, goes beyond safety and comfort metrics by evaluating instruction following and semantic coherence between model outputs. The multilingual reasoning traces in English, Spanish, and Chinese are from domain experts with diverse cultural backgrounds. Thus, our dataset is a unique resource for studying how different forms of reasoning affect driving competence. Our dataset is available at: https://hf.co/datasets/kit-mrt/kitscenes-longtail

With advances in imitation learning (IL) and large-scale driving datasets, end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has made great progress recently. Currently, IL-based methods have become a mainstream paradigm: models rely on standard driving behaviors given by experts, and learn to minimize the discrepancy between their actions and expert actions. However, this objective of "only driving like the expert" suffers from limited generalization: when encountering rare or unseen long-tail scenarios outside the distribution of expert demonstrations, models tend to produce unsafe decisions in the absence of prior experience. This raises a fundamental question: Can an E2E-AD system make reliable decisions without any expert action supervision? Motivated by this, we propose a unified framework named Risk-aware World Model Predictive Control (RaWMPC) to address this generalization dilemma through robust control, without reliance on expert demonstrations. Practically, RaWMPC leverages a world model to predict the consequences of multiple candidate actions and selects low-risk actions through explicit risk evaluation. To endow the world model with the ability to predict the outcomes of risky driving behaviors, we design a risk-aware interaction strategy that systematically exposes the world model to hazardous behaviors, making catastrophic outcomes predictable and thus avoidable. Furthermore, to generate low-risk candidate actions at test time, we introduce a self-evaluation distillation method to distill riskavoidance capabilities from the well-trained world model into a generative action proposal network without any expert demonstration. Extensive experiments show that RaWMPC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios, while providing superior decision interpretability.

Recent advancements in driving world models enable controllable generation of high-quality RGB videos or multimodal videos. Existing methods primarily focus on metrics related to generation quality and controllability. However, they often overlook the evaluation of downstream perception tasks, which are really crucial for the performance of autonomous driving. Existing methods usually leverage a training strategy that first pretrains on synthetic data and finetunes on real data, resulting in twice the epochs compared to the baseline (real data only). When we double the epochs in the baseline, the benefit of synthetic data becomes negligible. To thoroughly demonstrate the benefit of synthetic data, we introduce Dream4Drive, a novel synthetic data generation framework designed for enhancing the downstream perception tasks. Dream4Drive first decomposes the input video into several 3D-aware guidance maps and subsequently renders the 3D assets onto these guidance maps. Finally, the driving world model is fine-tuned to produce the edited, multi-view photorealistic videos, which can be used to train the downstream perception models. Dream4Drive enables unprecedented flexibility in generating multi-view corner cases at scale, significantly boosting corner case perception in autonomous driving. To facilitate future research, we also contribute a large-scale 3D asset dataset named DriveObj3D, covering the typical categories in driving scenarios and enabling diverse 3D-aware video editing. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that Dream4Drive can effectively boost the performance of downstream perception models under various training epochs. Page: https://wm-research.github.io/Dream4Drive/ GitHub Link: https://github.com/wm-research/Dream4Drive

Autonomous driving requires rich contextual comprehension and precise predictive reasoning to navigate dynamic and complex environments safely. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Driving World Models (DWMs) have independently emerged as powerful recipes addressing different aspects of this challenge. VLMs provide interpretability and robust action prediction through their ability to understand multi-modal context, while DWMs excel in generating detailed and plausible future driving scenarios essential for proactive planning. Integrating VLMs with DWMs is an intuitive, promising, yet understudied strategy to exploit the complementary strengths of accurate behavioral prediction and realistic scene generation. Nevertheless, this integration presents notable challenges, particularly in effectively connecting action-level decisions with high-fidelity pixel-level predictions and maintaining computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose ImagiDrive, a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework that integrates a VLM-based driving agent with a DWM-based scene imaginer to form a unified imagination-and-planning loop. The driving agent predicts initial driving trajectories based on multi-modal inputs, guiding the scene imaginer to generate corresponding future scenarios. These imagined scenarios are subsequently utilized to iteratively refine the driving agent's planning decisions. To address efficiency and predictive accuracy challenges inherent in this integration, we introduce an early stopping mechanism and a trajectory selection strategy. Extensive experimental validation on the nuScenes and NAVSIM datasets demonstrates the robustness and superiority of ImagiDrive over previous alternatives under both open-loop and closed-loop conditions.

End-to-end autonomous driving policies based on Imitation Learning (IL) often struggle in closed-loop execution due to the misalignment between inadequate open-loop training objectives and real driving requirements. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a solution by directly optimizing driving goals via reward signals, the rendering-based training environments introduce the rendering gap and are inefficient due to high computational costs. To overcome these challenges, we present a novel Pseudo-simulation-based RL method for closed-loop end-to-end autonomous driving, PerlAD. Based on offline datasets, PerlAD constructs a pseudo-simulation that operates in vector space, enabling efficient, rendering-free trial-and-error training. To bridge the gap between static datasets and dynamic closed-loop environments, PerlAD introduces a prediction world model that generates reactive agent trajectories conditioned on the ego vehicle's plan. Furthermore, to facilitate efficient planning, PerlAD utilizes a hierarchical decoupled planner that combines IL for lateral path generation and RL for longitudinal speed optimization. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that PerlAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Bench2Drive benchmark, surpassing the previous E2E RL method by 10.29% in Driving Score without requiring expensive online interactions. Additional evaluations on the DOS benchmark further confirm its reliability in handling safety-critical occlusion scenarios.

Real-world autonomous driving (AD) especially urban driving involves many corner cases. The lately released AD simulator CARLA v2 adds 39 common events in the driving scene, and provide more quasi-realistic testbed compared to CARLA v1. It poses new challenge to the community and so far no literature has reported any success on the new scenarios in V2 as existing works mostly have to rely on specific rules for planning yet they cannot cover the more complex cases in CARLA v2. In this work, we take the initiative of directly training a planner and the hope is to handle the corner cases flexibly and effectively, which we believe is also the future of AD. To our best knowledge, we develop the first model-based RL method named Think2Drive for AD, with a world model to learn the transitions of the environment, and then it acts as a neural simulator to train the planner. This paradigm significantly boosts the training efficiency due to the low dimensional state space and parallel computing of tensors in the world model. As a result, Think2Drive is able to run in an expert-level proficiency in CARLA v2 within 3 days of training on a single A6000 GPU, and to our best knowledge, so far there is no reported success (100\% route completion)on CARLA v2. We also propose CornerCase-Repository, a benchmark that supports the evaluation of driving models by scenarios. Additionally, we propose a new and balanced metric to evaluate the performance by route completion, infraction number, and scenario density, so that the driving score could give more information about the actual driving performance.

Data-driven simulators promise high data-efficiency for driving policy learning. When used for modelling interactions, this data-efficiency becomes a bottleneck: Small underlying datasets often lack interesting and challenging edge cases for learning interactive driving. We address this challenge by proposing a simulation method that uses in-painted ado vehicles for learning robust driving policies. Thus, our approach can be used to learn policies that involve multi-agent interactions and allows for training via state-of-the-art policy learning methods. We evaluate the approach for learning standard interaction scenarios in driving. In extensive experiments, our work demonstrates that the resulting policies can be directly transferred to a full-scale autonomous vehicle without making use of any traditional sim-to-real transfer techniques such as domain randomization.

Autonomous vehicle (AV) systems rely on robust perception models as a cornerstone of safety assurance. However, objects encountered on the road exhibit a long-tailed distribution, with rare or unseen categories posing challenges to a deployed perception model. This necessitates an expensive process of continuously curating and annotating data with significant human effort. We propose to leverage recent advances in vision-language and large language models to design an Automatic Data Engine (AIDE) that automatically identifies issues, efficiently curates data, improves the model through auto-labeling, and verifies the model through generation of diverse scenarios. This process operates iteratively, allowing for continuous self-improvement of the model. We further establish a benchmark for open-world detection on AV datasets to comprehensively evaluate various learning paradigms, demonstrating our method's superior performance at a reduced cost.

Recent studies have presented compelling evidence that large language models (LLMs) can equip embodied agents with the self-driven capability to interact with the world, which marks an initial step toward versatile robotics. However, these efforts tend to overlook the visual richness of open worlds, rendering the entire interactive process akin to "a blindfolded text-based game." Consequently, LLM-based agents frequently encounter challenges in intuitively comprehending their surroundings and producing responses that are easy to understand. In this paper, we propose Steve-Eye, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model designed to address this limitation. Steve-Eye integrates the LLM with a visual encoder which enables it to process visual-text inputs and generate multimodal feedback. In addition, we use a semi-automatic strategy to collect an extensive dataset comprising 850K open-world instruction pairs, empowering our model to encompass three essential functions for an agent: multimodal perception, foundational knowledge base, and skill prediction and planning. Lastly, we develop three open-world evaluation benchmarks, then carry out extensive experiments from a wide range of perspectives to validate our model's capability to strategically act and plan. Codes and datasets will be released.

While personalization has been explored in traditional autonomous driving systems, it remains largely overlooked in end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD), despite its growing prominence. This gap is critical, as user-aligned behavior is essential for trust, comfort, and widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles. A core challenge is the lack of large-scale real-world datasets annotated with diverse and fine-grained driving preferences, hindering the development and evaluation of personalized E2EAD models. In this work, we present the first large-scale real-world dataset enriched with annotations capturing diverse driving preferences, establishing a foundation for personalization in E2EAD. We extract static environmental features from real-world road topology and infer dynamic contextual cues using a fine-tuned visual language model (VLM), enabling consistent and fine-grained scenario construction. Based on these scenarios, we derive objective preference annotations through behavioral distribution analysis and rule-based heuristics. To address the inherent subjectivity of driving style, we further employ the VLM to generate subjective annotations by jointly modeling scene semantics and driver behavior. Final high-quality labels are obtained through a human-in-the-loop verification process that fuses both perspectives. Building on this dataset, we propose the first benchmark for evaluating personalized E2EAD models. We assess several state-of-the-art models with and without preference conditioning, demonstrating that incorporating personalized preferences results in behavior more aligned with human driving. Our work lays the foundation for personalized E2EAD by providing a standardized platform to systematically integrate human preferences into data-driven E2EAD systems, catalyzing future research in human-centric autonomy.

Accurately depicting the complex traffic scene is a vital component for autonomous vehicles to execute correct judgments. However, existing benchmarks tend to oversimplify the scene by solely focusing on lane perception tasks. Observing that human drivers rely on both lanes and traffic signals to operate their vehicles safely, we present OpenLane-V2, the first dataset on topology reasoning for traffic scene structure. The objective of the presented dataset is to advance research in understanding the structure of road scenes by examining the relationship between perceived entities, such as traffic elements and lanes. Leveraging existing datasets, OpenLane-V2 consists of 2,000 annotated road scenes that describe traffic elements and their correlation to the lanes. It comprises three primary sub-tasks, including the 3D lane detection inherited from OpenLane, accompanied by corresponding metrics to evaluate the model's performance. We evaluate various state-of-the-art methods, and present their quantitative and qualitative results on OpenLane-V2 to indicate future avenues for investigating topology reasoning in traffic scenes.

Collecting and annotating real-world data for safety-critical physical AI systems, such as Autonomous Vehicle (AV), is time-consuming and costly. It is especially challenging to capture rare edge cases, which play a critical role in training and testing of an AV system. To address this challenge, we introduce the Cosmos-Drive-Dreams - a synthetic data generation (SDG) pipeline that aims to generate challenging scenarios to facilitate downstream tasks such as perception and driving policy training. Powering this pipeline is Cosmos-Drive, a suite of models specialized from NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation model for the driving domain and are capable of controllable, high-fidelity, multi-view, and spatiotemporally consistent driving video generation. We showcase the utility of these models by applying Cosmos-Drive-Dreams to scale the quantity and diversity of driving datasets with high-fidelity and challenging scenarios. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our generated data helps in mitigating long-tail distribution problems and enhances generalization in downstream tasks such as 3D lane detection, 3D object detection and driving policy learning. We open source our pipeline toolkit, dataset and model weights through the NVIDIA's Cosmos platform. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/cosmos_drive_dreams

Latent World Models enhance scene representation through temporal self-supervised learning, presenting a perception annotation-free paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, the reconstruction-oriented representation learning tangles perception with planning tasks, leading to suboptimal optimization for planning. To address this challenge, we propose WorldRFT, a planning-oriented latent world model framework that aligns scene representation learning with planning via a hierarchical planning decomposition and local-aware interactive refinement mechanism, augmented by reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RFT) to enhance safety-critical policy performance. Specifically, WorldRFT integrates a vision-geometry foundation model to improve 3D spatial awareness, employs hierarchical planning task decomposition to guide representation optimization, and utilizes local-aware iterative refinement to derive a planning-oriented driving policy. Furthermore, we introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which applies trajectory Gaussianization and collision-aware rewards to fine-tune the driving policy, yielding systematic improvements in safety. WorldRFT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both open-loop nuScenes and closed-loop NavSim benchmarks. On nuScenes, it reduces collision rates by 83% (0.30% -> 0.05%). On NavSim, using camera-only sensors input, it attains competitive performance with the LiDAR-based SOTA method DiffusionDrive (87.8 vs. 88.1 PDMS).

General world models represent a crucial pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications ranging from virtual environments to decision-making systems. Recently, the emergence of the Sora model has attained significant attention due to its remarkable simulation capabilities, which exhibits an incipient comprehension of physical laws. In this survey, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in world models. Our analysis navigates through the forefront of generative methodologies in video generation, where world models stand as pivotal constructs facilitating the synthesis of highly realistic visual content. Additionally, we scrutinize the burgeoning field of autonomous-driving world models, meticulously delineating their indispensable role in reshaping transportation and urban mobility. Furthermore, we delve into the intricacies inherent in world models deployed within autonomous agents, shedding light on their profound significance in enabling intelligent interactions within dynamic environmental contexts. At last, we examine challenges and limitations of world models, and discuss their potential future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a foundational reference for the research community and inspire continued innovation. This survey will be regularly updated at: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/General-World-Models-Survey.

Despite the popularity of multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated and two-player applications, its success in messy real-world applications has been limited. A key challenge lies in its generalizability across problem variations, a common necessity for many real-world problems. Contextual reinforcement learning (CRL) formalizes learning policies that generalize across problem variations. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for multi-agent CRL has hindered progress in the field. Such benchmarks are desired to be based on real-world applications to naturally capture the many open challenges of real-world problems that affect generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose IntersectionZoo, a comprehensive benchmark suite for multi-agent CRL through the real-world application of cooperative eco-driving in urban road networks. The task of cooperative eco-driving is to control a fleet of vehicles to reduce fleet-level vehicular emissions. By grounding IntersectionZoo in a real-world application, we naturally capture real-world problem characteristics, such as partial observability and multiple competing objectives. IntersectionZoo is built on data-informed simulations of 16,334 signalized intersections derived from 10 major US cities, modeled in an open-source industry-grade microscopic traffic simulator. By modeling factors affecting vehicular exhaust emissions (e.g., temperature, road conditions, travel demand), IntersectionZoo provides one million data-driven traffic scenarios. Using these traffic scenarios, we benchmark popular multi-agent RL and human-like driving algorithms and demonstrate that the popular multi-agent RL algorithms struggle to generalize in CRL settings.

World models have emerged as promising neural simulators for autonomous driving, with the potential to supplement scarce real-world data and enable closed-loop evaluations. However, current research primarily evaluates these models based on visual realism or downstream task performance, with limited focus on fidelity to specific action instructions - a crucial property for generating targeted simulation scenes. Although some studies address action fidelity, their evaluations rely on closed-source mechanisms, limiting reproducibility. To address this gap, we develop an open-access evaluation framework, ACT-Bench, for quantifying action fidelity, along with a baseline world model, Terra. Our benchmarking framework includes a large-scale dataset pairing short context videos from nuScenes with corresponding future trajectory data, which provides conditional input for generating future video frames and enables evaluation of action fidelity for executed motions. Furthermore, Terra is trained on multiple large-scale trajectory-annotated datasets to enhance action fidelity. Leveraging this framework, we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art model does not fully adhere to given instructions, while Terra achieves improved action fidelity. All components of our benchmark framework will be made publicly available to support future research.

World models have attracted increasing attention in autonomous driving for their ability to forecast potential future scenarios. In this paper, we propose BEVWorld, a novel framework that transforms multimodal sensor inputs into a unified and compact Bird's Eye View (BEV) latent space for holistic environment modeling. The proposed world model consists of two main components: a multi-modal tokenizer and a latent BEV sequence diffusion model. The multi-modal tokenizer first encodes heterogeneous sensory data, and its decoder reconstructs the latent BEV tokens into LiDAR and surround-view image observations via ray-casting rendering in a self-supervised manner. This enables joint modeling and bidirectional encoding-decoding of panoramic imagery and point cloud data within a shared spatial representation. On top of this, the latent BEV sequence diffusion model performs temporally consistent forecasting of future scenes, conditioned on high-level action tokens, enabling scene-level reasoning over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of BEVWorld on autonomous driving benchmarks, showcasing its capability in realistic future scene generation and its benefits for downstream tasks such as perception and motion prediction.

Autonomous driving has seen significant progress, driven by extensive real-world data. However, in long-tail scenarios, accurately predicting the safety of the ego vehicle's future motion remains a major challenge due to uncertainties in dynamic environments and limitations in data coverage. In this work, we aim to explore whether it is possible to enhance the motion risk prediction capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLM) by synthesizing high-risk motion data. Specifically, we introduce a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) based motion simulation method to model risks from three aspects: the ego-vehicle, other vehicles, and the environment. This allows us to synthesize plug-and-play, high-risk motion data suitable for VLM training, which we call DriveMRP-10K. Furthermore, we design a VLM-agnostic motion risk estimation framework, named DriveMRP-Agent. This framework incorporates a novel information injection strategy for global context, ego-vehicle perspective, and trajectory projection, enabling VLMs to effectively reason about the spatial relationships between motion waypoints and the environment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by fine-tuning with DriveMRP-10K, our DriveMRP-Agent framework can significantly improve the motion risk prediction performance of multiple VLM baselines, with the accident recognition accuracy soaring from 27.13% to 88.03%. Moreover, when tested via zero-shot evaluation on an in-house real-world high-risk motion dataset, DriveMRP-Agent achieves a significant performance leap, boosting the accuracy from base_model's 29.42% to 68.50%, which showcases the strong generalization capabilities of our method in real-world scenarios.

Despite remarkable progress in driving world models, their potential for autonomous systems remains largely untapped: the world models are mostly learned for world simulation and decoupled from trajectory planning. While recent efforts aim to unify world modeling and planning in a single framework, the synergistic facilitation mechanism of world modeling for planning still requires further exploration. In this work, we introduce a new driving paradigm named Policy World Model (PWM), which not only integrates world modeling and trajectory planning within a unified architecture, but is also able to benefit planning using the learned world knowledge through the proposed action-free future state forecasting scheme. Through collaborative state-action prediction, PWM can mimic the human-like anticipatory perception, yielding more reliable planning performance. To facilitate the efficiency of video forecasting, we further introduce a dynamically enhanced parallel token generation mechanism, equipped with a context-guided tokenizer and an adaptive dynamic focal loss. Despite utilizing only front camera input, our method matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-view and multi-modal inputs. Code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/6550Zhao/Policy-World-Model.

We propose DOME, a diffusion-based world model that predicts future occupancy frames based on past occupancy observations. The ability of this world model to capture the evolution of the environment is crucial for planning in autonomous driving. Compared to 2D video-based world models, the occupancy world model utilizes a native 3D representation, which features easily obtainable annotations and is modality-agnostic. This flexibility has the potential to facilitate the development of more advanced world models. Existing occupancy world models either suffer from detail loss due to discrete tokenization or rely on simplistic diffusion architectures, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in predicting future occupancy with controllability. Our DOME exhibits two key features:(1) High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Generation. We adopt a spatial-temporal diffusion transformer to predict future occupancy frames based on historical context. This architecture efficiently captures spatial-temporal information, enabling high-fidelity details and the ability to generate predictions over long durations. (2)Fine-grained Controllability. We address the challenge of controllability in predictions by introducing a trajectory resampling method, which significantly enhances the model's ability to generate controlled predictions. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses existing baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes. Specifically, our approach surpasses the baseline by 10.5% in mIoU and 21.2% in IoU for occupancy reconstruction and by 36.0% in mIoU and 24.6% in IoU for 4D occupancy forecasting.

Recent advances in driving-scene generation and reconstruction have demonstrated significant potential for enhancing autonomous driving systems by producing scalable and controllable training data. Existing generation methods primarily focus on synthesizing diverse and high-fidelity driving videos; however, due to limited 3D consistency and sparse viewpoint coverage, they struggle to support convenient and high-quality novel-view synthesis (NVS). Conversely, recent 3D/4D reconstruction approaches have significantly improved NVS for real-world driving scenes, yet inherently lack generative capabilities. To overcome this dilemma between scene generation and reconstruction, we propose WorldSplat, a novel feed-forward framework for 4D driving-scene generation. Our approach effectively generates consistent multi-track videos through two key steps: (i) We introduce a 4D-aware latent diffusion model integrating multi-modal information to produce pixel-aligned 4D Gaussians in a feed-forward manner. (ii) Subsequently, we refine the novel view videos rendered from these Gaussians using a enhanced video diffusion model. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate that WorldSplat effectively generates high-fidelity, temporally and spatially consistent multi-track novel view driving videos. Project: https://wm-research.github.io/worldsplat/

Modern autonomous driving system is characterized as modular tasks in sequential order, i.e., perception, prediction, and planning. In order to perform a wide diversity of tasks and achieve advanced-level intelligence, contemporary approaches either deploy standalone models for individual tasks, or design a multi-task paradigm with separate heads. However, they might suffer from accumulative errors or deficient task coordination. Instead, we argue that a favorable framework should be devised and optimized in pursuit of the ultimate goal, i.e., planning of the self-driving car. Oriented at this, we revisit the key components within perception and prediction, and prioritize the tasks such that all these tasks contribute to planning. We introduce Unified Autonomous Driving (UniAD), a comprehensive framework up-to-date that incorporates full-stack driving tasks in one network. It is exquisitely devised to leverage advantages of each module, and provide complementary feature abstractions for agent interaction from a global perspective. Tasks are communicated with unified query interfaces to facilitate each other toward planning. We instantiate UniAD on the challenging nuScenes benchmark. With extensive ablations, the effectiveness of using such a philosophy is proven by substantially outperforming previous state-of-the-arts in all aspects. Code and models are public.

Human drivers rely on commonsense reasoning to navigate diverse and dynamic real-world scenarios. Existing end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving (AD) models are typically optimized to mimic driving patterns observed in data, without capturing the underlying reasoning processes. This limitation constrains their ability to handle challenging driving scenarios. To close this gap, we propose VLM-AD, a method that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) as teachers to enhance training by providing additional supervision that incorporates unstructured reasoning information and structured action labels. Such supervision enhances the model's ability to learn richer feature representations that capture the rationale behind driving patterns. Importantly, our method does not require a VLM during inference, making it practical for real-time deployment. When integrated with state-of-the-art methods, VLM-AD achieves significant improvements in planning accuracy and reduced collision rates on the nuScenes dataset.

The pursuit of autonomous driving technology hinges on the sophisticated integration of perception, decision-making, and control systems. Traditional approaches, both data-driven and rule-based, have been hindered by their inability to grasp the nuance of complex driving environments and the intentions of other road users. This has been a significant bottleneck, particularly in the development of common sense reasoning and nuanced scene understanding necessary for safe and reliable autonomous driving. The advent of Visual Language Models (VLM) represents a novel frontier in realizing fully autonomous vehicle driving. This report provides an exhaustive evaluation of the latest state-of-the-art VLM, \modelnamefull, and its application in autonomous driving scenarios. We explore the model's abilities to understand and reason about driving scenes, make decisions, and ultimately act in the capacity of a driver. Our comprehensive tests span from basic scene recognition to complex causal reasoning and real-time decision-making under varying conditions. Our findings reveal that \modelname demonstrates superior performance in scene understanding and causal reasoning compared to existing autonomous systems. It showcases the potential to handle out-of-distribution scenarios, recognize intentions, and make informed decisions in real driving contexts. However, challenges remain, particularly in direction discernment, traffic light recognition, vision grounding, and spatial reasoning tasks. These limitations underscore the need for further research and development. Project is now available on GitHub for interested parties to access and utilize: https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/GPT4V-AD-Exploration

Can we build accurate world models out of large language models (LLMs)? How can world models benefit LLM agents? The gap between the prior knowledge of LLMs and the specified environment's dynamics usually bottlenecks LLMs' performance as world models. To bridge the gap, we propose a training-free "world alignment" that learns an environment's symbolic knowledge complementary to LLMs. The symbolic knowledge covers action rules, knowledge graphs, and scene graphs, which are extracted by LLMs from exploration trajectories and encoded into executable codes to regulate LLM agents' policies. We further propose an RL-free, model-based agent "WALL-E 2.0" through the model-predictive control (MPC) framework. Unlike classical MPC requiring costly optimization on the fly, we adopt an LLM agent as an efficient look-ahead optimizer of future steps' actions by interacting with the neurosymbolic world model. While the LLM agent's strong heuristics make it an efficient planner in MPC, the quality of its planned actions is also secured by the accurate predictions of the aligned world model. They together considerably improve learning efficiency in a new environment. On open-world challenges in Mars (Minecraft like) and ALFWorld (embodied indoor environments), WALL-E 2.0 significantly outperforms existing methods, e.g., surpassing baselines in Mars by 16.1%-51.6% of success rate and by at least 61.7% in score. In ALFWorld, it achieves a new record 98% success rate after only 4 iterations.

Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have unlocked new prospects in autonomous driving, yet the experimental settings of these studies are preliminary, over-simplified, and fail to capture the complexity of real-world driving scenarios in human environments. It remains under-explored whether FM agents can handle long-horizon navigation tasks with free-from dialogue and deal with unexpected situations caused by environmental dynamics or task changes. To explore the capabilities and boundaries of FMs faced with the challenges above, we introduce DriVLMe, a video-language-model-based agent to facilitate natural and effective communication between humans and autonomous vehicles that perceive the environment and navigate. We develop DriVLMe from both embodied experiences in a simulated environment and social experiences from real human dialogue. While DriVLMe demonstrates competitive performance in both open-loop benchmarks and closed-loop human studies, we reveal several limitations and challenges, including unacceptable inference time, imbalanced training data, limited visual understanding, challenges with multi-turn interactions, simplified language generation from robotic experiences, and difficulties in handling on-the-fly unexpected situations like environmental dynamics and task changes.

Simulators can generate virtually unlimited driving data, yet imitation learning policies in simulation still struggle to achieve robust closed-loop performance. Motivated by this gap, we empirically study how misalignment between privileged expert demonstrations and sensor-based student observations can limit the effectiveness of imitation learning. More precisely, experts have significantly higher visibility (e.g., ignoring occlusions) and far lower uncertainty (e.g., knowing other vehicles' actions), making them difficult to imitate reliably. Furthermore, navigational intent (i.e., the route to follow) is under-specified in student models at test time via only a single target point. We demonstrate that these asymmetries can measurably limit driving performance in CARLA and offer practical interventions to address them. After careful modifications to narrow the gaps between expert and student, our TransFuser v6 (TFv6) student policy achieves a new state of the art on all major publicly available CARLA closed-loop benchmarks, reaching 95 DS on Bench2Drive and more than doubling prior performances on Longest6~v2 and Town13. Additionally, by integrating perception supervision from our dataset into a shared sim-to-real pipeline, we show consistent gains on the NAVSIM and Waymo Vision-Based End-to-End driving benchmarks. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/lead.

We present a versatile NeRF-based simulator for testing autonomous driving (AD) software systems, designed with a focus on sensor-realistic closed-loop evaluation and the creation of safety-critical scenarios. The simulator learns from sequences of real-world driving sensor data and enables reconfigurations and renderings of new, unseen scenarios. In this work, we use our simulator to test the responses of AD models to safety-critical scenarios inspired by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). Our evaluation reveals that, while state-of-the-art end-to-end planners excel in nominal driving scenarios in an open-loop setting, they exhibit critical flaws when navigating our safety-critical scenarios in a closed-loop setting. This highlights the need for advancements in the safety and real-world usability of end-to-end planners. By publicly releasing our simulator and scenarios as an easy-to-run evaluation suite, we invite the research community to explore, refine, and validate their AD models in controlled, yet highly configurable and challenging sensor-realistic environments. Code and instructions can be found at https://github.com/atonderski/neuro-ncap

In this paper, we explore the potential of using a large language model (LLM) to understand the driving environment in a human-like manner and analyze its ability to reason, interpret, and memorize when facing complex scenarios. We argue that traditional optimization-based and modular autonomous driving (AD) systems face inherent performance limitations when dealing with long-tail corner cases. To address this problem, we propose that an ideal AD system should drive like a human, accumulating experience through continuous driving and using common sense to solve problems. To achieve this goal, we identify three key abilities necessary for an AD system: reasoning, interpretation, and memorization. We demonstrate the feasibility of employing an LLM in driving scenarios by building a closed-loop system to showcase its comprehension and environment-interaction abilities. Our extensive experiments show that the LLM exhibits the impressive ability to reason and solve long-tailed cases, providing valuable insights for the development of human-like autonomous driving. The related code are available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/DriveLikeAHuman .

Recent advances in diffusion models have improved controllable streetscape generation and supported downstream perception and planning tasks. However, challenges remain in accurately modeling driving scenes and generating long videos. To alleviate these issues, we propose DreamForge, an advanced diffusion-based autoregressive video generation model tailored for 3D-controllable long-term generation. To enhance the lane and foreground generation, we introduce perspective guidance and integrate object-wise position encoding to incorporate local 3D correlation and improve foreground object modeling. We also propose motion-aware temporal attention to capture motion cues and appearance changes in videos. By leveraging motion frames and an autoregressive generation paradigm,we can autoregressively generate long videos (over 200 frames) using a model trained in short sequences, achieving superior quality compared to the baseline in 16-frame video evaluations. Finally, we integrate our method with the realistic simulator DriveArena to provide more reliable open-loop and closed-loop evaluations for vision-based driving agents. Project Page: https://pjlab-adg.github.io/DriveArena/dreamforge.

Language models uncover unprecedented abilities in analyzing driving scenarios, owing to their limitless knowledge accumulated from text-based pre-training. Naturally, they should particularly excel in analyzing rule-based interactions, such as those triggered by traffic laws, which are well documented in texts. However, such interaction analysis remains underexplored due to the lack of dedicated language datasets that address it. Therefore, we propose Waymo Open Motion Dataset-Reasoning (WOMD-Reasoning), a comprehensive large-scale Q&As dataset built on WOMD focusing on describing and reasoning traffic rule-induced interactions in driving scenarios. WOMD-Reasoning also presents by far the largest multi-modal Q&A dataset, with 3 million Q&As on real-world driving scenarios, covering a wide range of driving topics from map descriptions and motion status descriptions to narratives and analyses of agents' interactions, behaviors, and intentions. To showcase the applications of WOMD-Reasoning, we design Motion-LLaVA, a motion-language model fine-tuned on WOMD-Reasoning. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations are performed on WOMD-Reasoning dataset as well as the outputs of Motion-LLaVA, supporting the data quality and wide applications of WOMD-Reasoning, in interaction predictions, traffic rule compliance plannings, etc. The dataset and its vision modal extension are available on https://waymo.com/open/download/. The codes & prompts to build it are available on https://github.com/yhli123/WOMD-Reasoning.

Training and evaluating autonomous driving algorithms requires a diverse range of scenarios. However, most available datasets predominantly consist of normal driving behaviors demonstrated by human drivers, resulting in a limited number of safety-critical cases. This imbalance, often referred to as a long-tail distribution, restricts the ability of driving algorithms to learn from crucial scenarios involving risk or failure, scenarios that are essential for humans to develop driving skills efficiently. To generate such scenarios, we utilize Multi-modal Large Language Models to convert crash reports of accidents into a structured scenario format, which can be directly executed within simulations. Specifically, we introduce CrashAgent, a multi-agent framework designed to interpret multi-modal real-world traffic crash reports for the generation of both road layouts and the behaviors of the ego vehicle and surrounding traffic participants. We comprehensively evaluate the generated crash scenarios from multiple perspectives, including the accuracy of layout reconstruction, collision rate, and diversity. The resulting high-quality and large-scale crash dataset will be publicly available to support the development of safe driving algorithms in handling safety-critical situations.

Although end-to-end autonomous driving has made remarkable progress, its performance degrades significantly in rare and long-tail scenarios. Recent approaches attempt to address this challenge by leveraging the rich world knowledge of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but these methods suffer from several limitations: (1) a significant domain gap between the pre-training data of VLMs and real-world driving data, (2) a dimensionality mismatch between the discrete language space and the continuous action space, and (3) imitation learning tends to capture the average behavior present in the dataset, which may be suboptimal even dangerous. In this paper, we propose ReCogDrive, an autonomous driving system that integrates VLMs with diffusion planner, which adopts a three-stage paradigm for training. In the first stage, we use a large-scale driving question-answering datasets to train the VLMs, mitigating the domain discrepancy between generic content and real-world driving scenarios. In the second stage, we employ a diffusion-based planner to perform imitation learning, mapping representations from the latent language space to continuous driving actions. Finally, we fine-tune the diffusion planner using reinforcement learning with NAVSIM non-reactive simulator, enabling the model to generate safer, more human-like driving trajectories. We evaluate our approach on the planning-oriented NAVSIM benchmark, achieving a PDMS of 89.6 and setting a new state-of-the-art that surpasses the previous vision-only SOTA by 5.6 PDMS.

Focusing on the task of point-to-point navigation for an autonomous driving vehicle, we propose a novel deep learning model trained with end-to-end and multi-task learning manners to perform both perception and control tasks simultaneously. The model is used to drive the ego vehicle safely by following a sequence of routes defined by the global planner. The perception part of the model is used to encode high-dimensional observation data provided by an RGBD camera while performing semantic segmentation, semantic depth cloud (SDC) mapping, and traffic light state and stop sign prediction. Then, the control part decodes the encoded features along with additional information provided by GPS and speedometer to predict waypoints that come with a latent feature space. Furthermore, two agents are employed to process these outputs and make a control policy that determines the level of steering, throttle, and brake as the final action. The model is evaluated on CARLA simulator with various scenarios made of normal-adversarial situations and different weathers to mimic real-world conditions. In addition, we do a comparative study with some recent models to justify the performance in multiple aspects of driving. Moreover, we also conduct an ablation study on SDC mapping and multi-agent to understand their roles and behavior. As a result, our model achieves the highest driving score even with fewer parameters and computation load. To support future studies, we share our codes at https://github.com/oskarnatan/end-to-end-driving.

Evaluating the performance of autonomous vehicle planning algorithms necessitates simulating long-tail safety-critical traffic scenarios. However, traditional methods for generating such scenarios often fall short in terms of controllability and realism; they also neglect the dynamics of agent interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce SAFE-SIM, a novel diffusion-based controllable closed-loop safety-critical simulation framework. Our approach yields two distinct advantages: 1) generating realistic long-tail safety-critical scenarios that closely reflect real-world conditions, and 2) providing controllable adversarial behavior for more comprehensive and interactive evaluations. We develop a novel approach to simulate safety-critical scenarios through an adversarial term in the denoising process of diffusion models, which allows an adversarial agent to challenge a planner with plausible maneuvers while all agents in the scene exhibit reactive and realistic behaviors. Furthermore, we propose novel guidance objectives and a partial diffusion process that enables users to control key aspects of the scenarios, such as the collision type and aggressiveness of the adversarial agent, while maintaining the realism of the behavior. We validate our framework empirically using the nuScenes and nuPlan datasets across multiple planners, demonstrating improvements in both realism and controllability. These findings affirm that diffusion models provide a robust and versatile foundation for safety-critical, interactive traffic simulation, extending their utility across the broader autonomous driving landscape. Project website: https://safe-sim.github.io/.

End-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) demands effective processing of multi-view sensory data and robust handling of diverse and complex driving scenarios, particularly rare maneuvers such as aggressive turns. Recent success of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture in Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates that specialization of parameters enables strong scalability. In this work, we propose DriveMoE, a novel MoE-based E2E-AD framework, with a Scene-Specialized Vision MoE and a Skill-Specialized Action MoE. DriveMoE is built upon our pi_0 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) baseline (originally from the embodied AI field), called Drive-pi_0. Specifically, we add Vision MoE to Drive-pi_0 by training a router to select relevant cameras according to the driving context dynamically. This design mirrors human driving cognition, where drivers selectively attend to crucial visual cues rather than exhaustively processing all visual information. In addition, we add Action MoE by training another router to activate specialized expert modules for different driving behaviors. Through explicit behavioral specialization, DriveMoE is able to handle diverse scenarios without suffering from modes averaging like existing models. In Bench2Drive closed-loop evaluation experiments, DriveMoE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining vision and action MoE in autonomous driving tasks. We will release our code and models of DriveMoE and Drive-pi_0.

The quest for fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) capable of navigating complex real-world scenarios with human-like understanding and responsiveness. In this paper, we introduce Dolphins, a novel vision-language model architected to imbibe human-like abilities as a conversational driving assistant. Dolphins is adept at processing multimodal inputs comprising video (or image) data, text instructions, and historical control signals to generate informed outputs corresponding to the provided instructions. Building upon the open-sourced pretrained Vision-Language Model, OpenFlamingo, we first enhance Dolphins's reasoning capabilities through an innovative Grounded Chain of Thought (GCoT) process. Then we tailored Dolphins to the driving domain by constructing driving-specific instruction data and conducting instruction tuning. Through the utilization of the BDD-X dataset, we designed and consolidated four distinct AV tasks into Dolphins to foster a holistic understanding of intricate driving scenarios. As a result, the distinctive features of Dolphins are characterized into two dimensions: (1) the ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of complex and long-tailed open-world driving scenarios and solve a spectrum of AV tasks, and (2) the emergence of human-like capabilities including gradient-free instant adaptation via in-context learning and error recovery via reflection.

Human driving behavior is inherently personal, which is shaped by long-term habits and influenced by short-term intentions. Individuals differ in how they accelerate, brake, merge, yield, and overtake across diverse situations. However, existing end-to-end autonomous driving systems either optimize for generic objectives or rely on fixed driving modes, lacking the ability to adapt to individual preferences or interpret natural language intent. To address this gap, we propose Drive My Way (DMW), a personalized Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving framework that aligns with users' long-term driving habits and adapts to real-time user instructions. DMW learns a user embedding from our personalized driving dataset collected across multiple real drivers and conditions the policy on this embedding during planning, while natural language instructions provide additional short-term guidance. Closed-loop evaluation on the Bench2Drive benchmark demonstrates that DMW improves style instruction adaptation, and user studies show that its generated behaviors are recognizable as each driver's own style, highlighting personalization as a key capability for human-centered autonomous driving. Our data and code are available at https://dmw-cvpr.github.io/.

Autonomous driving promises transformative improvements to transportation, but building systems capable of safely navigating the unstructured complexity of real-world scenarios remains challenging. A critical problem lies in effectively predicting the various potential outcomes that may emerge in response to the vehicle's actions as the world evolves. To address this challenge, we introduce GAIA-1 ('Generative AI for Autonomy'), a generative world model that leverages video, text, and action inputs to generate realistic driving scenarios while offering fine-grained control over ego-vehicle behavior and scene features. Our approach casts world modeling as an unsupervised sequence modeling problem by mapping the inputs to discrete tokens, and predicting the next token in the sequence. Emerging properties from our model include learning high-level structures and scene dynamics, contextual awareness, generalization, and understanding of geometry. The power of GAIA-1's learned representation that captures expectations of future events, combined with its ability to generate realistic samples, provides new possibilities for innovation in the field of autonomy, enabling enhanced and accelerated training of autonomous driving technology.

End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a promising paradigm for directly mapping sensor inputs to planning maneuvers using learning-based modular integrations. However, existing imitation learning (IL)-based models suffer from generalization to hard cases, and a lack of corrective feedback loop under post-deployment. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a potential solution to tackle hard cases with optimality, it is often hindered by overfitting to specific driving cases, resulting in catastrophic forgetting of generalizable knowledge and sample inefficiency. To overcome these challenges, we propose Reinforced Refinement with Self-aware Expansion (R2SE), a novel learning pipeline that constantly refines hard domain while keeping generalizable driving policy for model-agnostic end-to-end driving systems. Through reinforcement fine-tuning and policy expansion that facilitates continuous improvement, R2SE features three key components: 1) Generalist Pretraining with hard-case allocation trains a generalist imitation learning (IL) driving system while dynamically identifying failure-prone cases for targeted refinement; 2) Residual Reinforced Specialist Fine-tuning optimizes residual corrections using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve performance in hard case domain while preserving global driving knowledge; 3) Self-aware Adapter Expansion dynamically integrates specialist policies back into the generalist model, enhancing continuous performance improvement. Experimental results in closed-loop simulation and real-world datasets demonstrate improvements in generalization, safety, and long-horizon policy robustness over state-of-the-art E2E systems, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforce refinement for scalable autonomous driving.

Vision-Language Models(VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet a substantial gap remains between their current capabilities and the reliability necessary for real-world deployment. A critical challenge is their fragility, characterized by hallucinations and poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MTRDrive, a novel framework that integrates procedural driving experiences with a dynamic toolkit to enhance generalization and proactive decision-making. MTRDrive addresses these limitations through a closed-loop system that combines a memory-based experience retrieval mechanism with dynamic toolkits. This synergy enables the model to interact more effectively with its environment, improving both reasoning and decision-making capabilities with the help of our memory-tool synergistic reasoning. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark based on complex Roadwork construction scenarios to rigorously evaluate zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our approach. On the public NAVSIM benchmark, our 3B-parameter MTRDrive model achieves an exceptional PDMS of 88.3 without chain-of-thought and sets a state-of-the-art performance bar on high-level planning, with a driving metric score of 79.8\% and a planning accuracy of 82.6\%. Rigorous zero-shot evaluation on the new Roadwork-VLM benchmark shows a strong ability to reason robustly in unseen scenarios, achieving a driving metric score of 80.2\%. These results highlight MTRDrive's potential to advance autonomous driving toward safer and more reliable systems.

Humans can quickly learn new behaviors by leveraging background world knowledge. In contrast, agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) typically learn behaviors from scratch. We thus propose a novel approach that uses the vast amounts of general and indexable world knowledge encoded in vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on Internet-scale data for embodied RL. We initialize policies with VLMs by using them as promptable representations: embeddings that are grounded in visual observations and encode semantic features based on the VLM's internal knowledge, as elicited through prompts that provide task context and auxiliary information. We evaluate our approach on visually-complex, long horizon RL tasks in Minecraft and robot navigation in Habitat. We find that our policies trained on embeddings extracted from general-purpose VLMs outperform equivalent policies trained on generic, non-promptable image embeddings. We also find our approach outperforms instruction-following methods and performs comparably to domain-specific embeddings.

Trajectory prediction in autonomous driving relies on accurate representation of all relevant contexts of the driving scene, including traffic participants, road topology, traffic signs, as well as their semantic relations to each other. Despite increased attention to this issue, most approaches in trajectory prediction do not consider all of these factors sufficiently. We present SemanticFormer, an approach for predicting multimodal trajectories by reasoning over a semantic traffic scene graph using a hybrid approach. It utilizes high-level information in the form of meta-paths, i.e. trajectories on which an agent is allowed to drive from a knowledge graph which is then processed by a novel pipeline based on multiple attention mechanisms to predict accurate trajectories. SemanticFormer comprises a hierarchical heterogeneous graph encoder to capture spatio-temporal and relational information across agents as well as between agents and road elements. Further, it includes a predictor to fuse different encodings and decode trajectories with probabilities. Finally, a refinement module assesses permitted meta-paths of trajectories and speed profiles to obtain final predicted trajectories. Evaluation of the nuScenes benchmark demonstrates improved performance compared to several SOTA methods. In addition, we demonstrate that our knowledge graph can be easily added to two graph-based existing SOTA methods, namely VectorNet and Laformer, replacing their original homogeneous graphs. The evaluation results suggest that by adding our knowledge graph the performance of the original methods is enhanced by 5% and 4%, respectively.

End-to-End (E2E) solutions have emerged as a mainstream approach for autonomous driving systems, with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models representing a new paradigm that leverages pre-trained multimodal knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret and interact with complex real-world environments. However, these methods remain constrained by the limitations of imitation learning, which struggles to inherently encode physical rules during training. Existing approaches often rely on complex rule-based post-refinement, employ reinforcement learning that remains largely limited to simulation, or utilize diffusion guidance that requires computationally expensive gradient calculations. To address these challenges, we introduce ReflectDrive, a novel learning-based framework that integrates a reflection mechanism for safe trajectory generation via discrete diffusion. We first discretize the two-dimensional driving space to construct an action codebook, enabling the use of pre-trained Diffusion Language Models for planning tasks through fine-tuning. Central to our approach is a safety-aware reflection mechanism that performs iterative self-correction without gradient computation. Our method begins with goal-conditioned trajectory generation to model multi-modal driving behaviors. Based on this, we apply local search methods to identify unsafe tokens and determine feasible solutions, which then serve as safe anchors for inpainting-based regeneration. Evaluated on the NAVSIM benchmark, ReflectDrive demonstrates significant advantages in safety-critical trajectory generation, offering a scalable and reliable solution for autonomous driving systems.

Recently, action-based decision-making in open-world environments has gained significant attention. Visual Language Action (VLA) models, pretrained on large-scale web datasets, have shown promise in decision-making tasks. However, previous work has primarily focused on action post-training, often neglecting enhancements to the foundational model itself. In response, we introduce a novel approach, Act from Visual Language Post-Training, which refines Visual Language Models (VLMs) through visual and linguistic guidance in a self-supervised manner. This enhancement improves the models' capabilities in world knowledge, visual recognition, and spatial grounding in open-world environments. Following the above post-training paradigms, we obtain the first VLA models in Minecraft that can follow human instructions on over 1k different atomic tasks, including crafting, smelting, cooking, mining, and killing. Our experiments demonstrate that post-training on non-trajectory tasks leads to a significant 40% improvement over the best agent baseline on a diverse set of atomic tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses traditional imitation learning-based policies in Minecraft, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We have open-sourced the code, models, and datasets to foster further research. The project page can be found in https://craftjarvis.github.io/JarvisVLA.

We introduce LLM-Wikirace, a benchmark for evaluating planning, reasoning, and world knowledge in large language models (LLMs). In LLM-Wikirace, models must efficiently navigate Wikipedia hyperlinks step by step to reach a target page from a given source, requiring look-ahead planning and the ability to reason about how concepts are connected in the real world. We evaluate a broad set of open- and closed-source models, including Gemini-3, GPT-5, and Claude Opus 4.5, which achieve the strongest results on the easy level of the task and demonstrate superhuman performance. Despite this, performance drops sharply on hard difficulty: the best-performing model, Gemini-3, succeeds in only 23\% of hard games, highlighting substantial remaining challenges for frontier models. Our analysis shows that world knowledge is a necessary ingredient for success, but only up to a point, beyond this threshold, planning and long-horizon reasoning capabilities become the dominant factors. Trajectory-level analysis further reveals that even the strongest models struggle to replan after failure, frequently entering loops rather than recovering. LLM-Wikirace is a simple benchmark that reveals clear limitations in current reasoning systems, offering an open arena where planning-capable LLMs still have much to prove. Our code and leaderboard available at https:/llmwikirace.github.io.

Modeling the interaction between traffic agents is a key issue in designing safe and non-conservative maneuvers in autonomous driving. This problem can be challenging when multi-modality and behavioral uncertainties are engaged. Existing methods either fail to plan interactively or consider unimodal behaviors that could lead to catastrophic results. In this paper, we introduce an integrated decision-making and trajectory planning framework based on Bayesian game (i.e., game of incomplete information). Human decisions inherently exhibit discrete characteristics and therefore are modeled as types of players in the game. A general solver based on no-regret learning is introduced to obtain a corresponding Bayesian Coarse Correlated Equilibrium, which captures the interaction between traffic agents in the multimodal context. With the attained equilibrium, decision-making and trajectory planning are performed simultaneously, and the resulting interactive strategy is shown to be optimal over the expectation of rivals' driving intentions. Closed-loop simulations on different traffic scenarios are performed to illustrate the generalizability and the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Online scene perception and topology reasoning are critical for autonomous vehicles to understand their driving environments, particularly for mapless driving systems that endeavor to reduce reliance on costly High-Definition (HD) maps. However, recent advances in online scene understanding still face limitations, especially in long-range or occluded scenarios, due to the inherent constraints of onboard sensors. To address this challenge, we propose a Standard-Definition (SD) Map Enhanced scene Perception and Topology reasoning (SEPT) framework, which explores how to effectively incorporate the SD map as prior knowledge into existing perception and reasoning pipelines. Specifically, we introduce a novel hybrid feature fusion strategy that combines SD maps with Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, considering both rasterized and vectorized representations, while mitigating potential misalignment between SD maps and BEV feature spaces. Additionally, we leverage the SD map characteristics to design an auxiliary intersection-aware keypoint detection task, which further enhances the overall scene understanding performance. Experimental results on the large-scale OpenLane-V2 dataset demonstrate that by effectively integrating SD map priors, our framework significantly improves both scene perception and topology reasoning, outperforming existing methods by a substantial margin.

Vision-language-action models have reshaped autonomous driving to incorporate languages into the decision-making process. However, most existing pipelines only utilize the language modality for scene descriptions or reasoning and lack the flexibility to follow diverse user instructions for personalized driving. To address this, we first construct a large-scale driving dataset (InstructScene) containing around 100,000 scenes annotated with diverse driving instructions with the corresponding trajectories. We then propose a unified Vision-Language-World-Action model, Vega, for instruction-based generation and planning. We employ the autoregressive paradigm to process visual inputs (vision) and language instructions (language) and the diffusion paradigm to generate future predictions (world modeling) and trajectories (action). We perform joint attention to enable interactions between the modalities and use individual projection layers for different modalities for more capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves superior planning performance but also exhibits strong instruction-following abilities, paving the way for more intelligent and personalized driving systems.

In the past decade, autonomous driving has experienced rapid development in both academia and industry. However, its limited interpretability remains a significant unsolved problem, severely hindering autonomous vehicle commercialization and further development. Previous approaches utilizing small language models have failed to address this issue due to their lack of flexibility, generalization ability, and robustness. Recently, multimodal large language models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention from the research community for their capability to process and reason non-text data (e.g., images and videos) by text. In this paper, we present DriveGPT4, an interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving system utilizing LLMs. DriveGPT4 is capable of interpreting vehicle actions and providing corresponding reasoning, as well as answering diverse questions posed by human users for enhanced interaction. Additionally, DriveGPT4 predicts vehicle low-level control signals in an end-to-end fashion. These capabilities stem from a customized visual instruction tuning dataset specifically designed for autonomous driving. To the best of our knowledge, DriveGPT4 is the first work focusing on interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving. When evaluated on multiple tasks alongside conventional methods and video understanding LLMs, DriveGPT4 demonstrates superior qualitative and quantitative performance. Additionally, DriveGPT4 can be generalized in a zero-shot fashion to accommodate more unseen scenarios. The project page is available at https://tonyxuqaq.github.io/projects/DriveGPT4/ .

Reinforcement learning (RL), with its ability to explore and optimize policies in complex, dynamic decision-making tasks, has emerged as a promising approach to addressing motion planning (MoP) challenges in autonomous driving (AD). Despite rapid advancements in RL and AD, a systematic description and interpretation of the RL design process tailored to diverse driving tasks remains underdeveloped. This survey provides a comprehensive review of RL-based MoP for AD, focusing on lessons from task-specific perspectives. We first outline the fundamentals of RL methodologies, and then survey their applications in MoP, analyzing scenario-specific features and task requirements to shed light on their influence on RL design choices. Building on this analysis, we summarize key design experiences, extract insights from various driving task applications, and provide guidance for future implementations. Additionally, we examine the frontier challenges in RL-based MoP, review recent efforts to addresse these challenges, and propose strategies for overcoming unresolved issues.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) collect and pseudo-label terabytes of multi-modal data localized to HD maps during normal fleet testing. However, identifying interesting and safety-critical scenarios from uncurated driving logs remains a significant challenge. Traditional scenario mining techniques are error-prone and prohibitively time-consuming, often relying on hand-crafted structured queries. In this work, we revisit spatio-temporal scenario mining through the lens of recent vision-language models (VLMs) to detect whether a described scenario occurs in a driving log and, if so, precisely localize it in both time and space. To address this problem, we introduce RefAV, a large-scale dataset of 10,000 diverse natural language queries that describe complex multi-agent interactions relevant to motion planning derived from 1000 driving logs in the Argoverse 2 Sensor dataset. We evaluate several referential multi-object trackers and present an empirical analysis of our baselines. Notably, we find that naively repurposing off-the-shelf VLMs yields poor performance, suggesting that scenario mining presents unique challenges. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/CainanD/RefAV/ and https://argoverse.github.io/user-guide/tasks/scenario_mining.html

We describe a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in diverse, open-world environments. At the core of our method is a learned latent variable model of distances and actions, along with a non-parametric topological memory of images. We use an information bottleneck to regularize the learned policy, giving us (i) a compact visual representation of goals, (ii) improved generalization capabilities, and (iii) a mechanism for sampling feasible goals for exploration. Trained on a large offline dataset of prior experience, the model acquires a representation of visual goals that is robust to task-irrelevant distractors. We demonstrate our method on a mobile ground robot in open-world exploration scenarios. Given an image of a goal that is up to 80 meters away, our method leverages its representation to explore and discover the goal in under 20 minutes, even amidst previously-unseen obstacles and weather conditions. Please check out the project website for videos of our experiments and information about the real-world dataset used at https://sites.google.com/view/recon-robot.

Autonomous vehicles operating in complex real-world environments require accurate predictions of interactive behaviors between traffic participants. This paper tackles the interaction prediction problem by formulating it with hierarchical game theory and proposing the GameFormer model for its implementation. The model incorporates a Transformer encoder, which effectively models the relationships between scene elements, alongside a novel hierarchical Transformer decoder structure. At each decoding level, the decoder utilizes the prediction outcomes from the previous level, in addition to the shared environmental context, to iteratively refine the interaction process. Moreover, we propose a learning process that regulates an agent's behavior at the current level to respond to other agents' behaviors from the preceding level. Through comprehensive experiments on large-scale real-world driving datasets, we demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy of our model on the Waymo interaction prediction task. Additionally, we validate the model's capacity to jointly reason about the motion plan of the ego agent and the behaviors of multiple agents in both open-loop and closed-loop planning tests, outperforming various baseline methods. Furthermore, we evaluate the efficacy of our model on the nuPlan planning benchmark, where it achieves leading performance.

Despite promising progress in reinforcement learning (RL), developing algorithms for autonomous driving (AD) remains challenging: one of the critical issues being the absence of an open-source platform capable of training and effectively validating the RL policies on real-world data. We propose DriverGym, an open-source OpenAI Gym-compatible environment specifically tailored for developing RL algorithms for autonomous driving. DriverGym provides access to more than 1000 hours of expert logged data and also supports reactive and data-driven agent behavior. The performance of an RL policy can be easily validated on real-world data using our extensive and flexible closed-loop evaluation protocol. In this work, we also provide behavior cloning baselines using supervised learning and RL, trained in DriverGym. We make DriverGym code, as well as all the baselines publicly available to further stimulate development from the community.

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving, where data efficiency and robustness are critical. Yet, existing solutions often rely on carefully crafted, task specific extrinsic rewards, limiting generalization to new tasks or environments. In this paper, we propose InDRiVE (Intrinsic Disagreement based Reinforcement for Vehicle Exploration), a method that leverages purely intrinsic, disagreement based rewards within a Dreamer based MBRL framework. By training an ensemble of world models, the agent actively explores high uncertainty regions of environments without any task specific feedback. This approach yields a task agnostic latent representation, allowing for rapid zero shot or few shot fine tuning on downstream driving tasks such as lane following and collision avoidance. Experimental results in both seen and unseen environments demonstrate that InDRiVE achieves higher success rates and fewer infractions compared to DreamerV2 and DreamerV3 baselines despite using significantly fewer training steps. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of purely intrinsic exploration for learning robust vehicle control behaviors, paving the way for more scalable and adaptable autonomous driving systems.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios in autonomous driving pose critical challenges, as planners often fail to generalize beyond their training experience, leading to unsafe or unexpected behavior. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise in handling such scenarios by providing high-level scene understanding and user-aligned decisions. However, existing VLMs often exhibit a misalignment between their language-based reasoning and the low-level trajectories required for action-level planning. In this paper, we propose LaViPlan, a framework that leverages Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to fine-tune VLMs using planning-oriented metrics. Experimental results show that LaViPlan improves planning performance across both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. While linguistic fidelity slightly decreases after RLVR-based fine-tuning, qualitative evaluation indicates that the outputs remain coherent. We also conduct ablation studies to analyze the effects of sampling ratio and reasoning guidance, highlighting how these design choices influence performance. These findings demonstrate the potential of RLVR as a post-training paradigm for aligning language-guided reasoning with action-level planning in autonomous driving.

The release of nuPlan marks a new era in vehicle motion planning research, offering the first large-scale real-world dataset and evaluation schemes requiring both precise short-term planning and long-horizon ego-forecasting. Existing systems struggle to simultaneously meet both requirements. Indeed, we find that these tasks are fundamentally misaligned and should be addressed independently. We further assess the current state of closed-loop planning in the field, revealing the limitations of learning-based methods in complex real-world scenarios and the value of simple rule-based priors such as centerline selection through lane graph search algorithms. More surprisingly, for the open-loop sub-task, we observe that the best results are achieved when using only this centerline as scene context (\ie, ignoring all information regarding the map and other agents). Combining these insights, we propose an extremely simple and efficient planner which outperforms an extensive set of competitors, winning the nuPlan planning challenge 2023.

Recently, world-action models (WAM) have emerged to bridge vision-language-action (VLA) models and world models, unifying their reasoning and instruction-following capabilities and spatio-temporal world modeling. However, existing WAM approaches often focus on modeling 2D appearance or latent representations, with limited geometric grounding-an essential element for embodied systems operating in the physical world. We present DriveDreamer-Policy, a unified driving world-action model that integrates depth generation, future video generation, and motion planning within a single modular architecture. The model employs a large language model to process language instructions, multi-view images, and actions, followed by three lightweight generators that produce depth, future video, and actions. By learning a geometry-aware world representation and using it to guide both future prediction and planning within a unified framework, the proposed model produces more coherent imagined futures and more informed driving actions, while maintaining modularity and controllable latency. Experiments on the Navsim v1 and v2 benchmarks demonstrate that DriveDreamer-Policy achieves strong performance on both closed-loop planning and world generation tasks. In particular, our model reaches 89.2 PDMS on Navsim v1 and 88.7 EPDMS on Navsim v2, outperforming existing world-model-based approaches while producing higher-quality future video and depth predictions. Ablation studies further show that explicit depth learning provides complementary benefits to video imagination and improves planning robustness.