VLA

Introduction End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress in recent years, yet deploying Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in real-world driving scenarios remains challenging. The fundamental difficulties are fourfold. First, multi-frame temporal understanding requires the model to extract decision-relevant changes from highly redundant consecutive observations, rather than merely processing static snapshots. Second, driving decisions must be causal: the model must model why a particular action is taken, not just learn statistical correlations between situations and actions. Third, predicted trajectories must satisfy kinematic and dynamic constraints while remaining multi-modal and efficient enough for real-time inference. Fourth, the reasoning process must be tightly aligned with action output—reasoning should not be a post-hoc rationalization but must be verifiable by and constrained by the actual actions taken. ...

Introduction The trajectory of autonomous driving architecture has undergone a paradigm shift: from the classical modular pipeline (perception →\to prediction →\to planning →\to control) toward end-to-end systems that map sensory inputs directly to driving actions. This transition is not merely an engineering convenience—it reflects a deep recognition that modular interfaces impose information bottlenecks and that joint optimization across the full stack can yield emergent capabilities invisible to individually optimized modules. The evolution can be broadly characterized in three phases: ...