This work proposes a new framework that integrates structured reasoning and geometric precision through a teacher-student architecture and outperforms classical reasoning-based baselines in zero-shot reasoning, waypoint accuracy, and inference efficiency.
Abstract
End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving aims to learn a direct mapping from visual observations to control actions. However, these E2E models often act as black boxes and struggle with complex scenarios. To address this, recent works incorporate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to provide explicit reasoning, enhancing both interpretability and driving robustness. These approaches typically rely on pre-generated annotations, which suffer from potentially flawed labels and require costly human labor. In this work, we propose a new framework that integrates structured reasoning and geometric precision through a teacher-student architecture. The teacher model introduces reflective reasoning, where the VLM generates logical explanations and then reflectively refines the reasoning under the supervision of ground-truth action. This enhances zero-shot generalization without intermediate labels. The student model distills the teacher's reasoning capabilities via supervised fine-tuning. We also design a separate waypoint decoder that interprets textual reasoning into continuous trajectories. Our proposed solution integrates two goals: providing explicit reasoning for interpretability and delivering robust and accurate driving performance. It leverages the synergy between these two objectives within a staged inference engine to enhance driving performance and explicitly uses the reasoning to guide driving prediction. Evaluated on Waymo benchmarks, our framework outperforms classical reasoning-based baselines in zero-shot reasoning, waypoint accuracy, and inference efficiency. Our experiments validate this design, demonstrating that the reasoning text makes a significant contribution to driving inference, resulting in around a 24% improvement in performance compared to an identical model that lacks reasoning. Our work advances reasoning-driven autonomous driving toward interpretable and deployable systems.
Latent-OPD is proposed, which augments OPD with trajectory-level latent distillation and introduces a progressive teacher-lookahead strategy, which aligns middle-to-late student layers with increasingly deeper teacher layers, establishing Latent-OPD as a highly effective approach to frame-efficient video reasoning.
Aoni Shen, Yongheng Zhang, Yinghui Li et al.· 1 citation
This work proposes $O^2-CritiCuRL, a novel curriculum reinforcement learning framework that introduces critical-step awareness through an iterative offline-online paradigm, and employs a progressive step-level reinforcement learning strategy, where truncated chains guide the model to infer missing steps and refine its reasoning.
Wendi Deng, Hang Du, Guoshun Nan et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
A latent memory pool is constructed that stores failure cases along with their structure scene representations and expert trajectory labels, and a dedicated Retrieve Model that decouples static road structure and dynamic agent interactions to enable structurally grounded retrieval is designed.
Zebin Xing, Yupeng Zheng, Qiangyu Chen et al.· 0 citations
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex spatial scene understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their open-ended reasoning process is prone to decision errors and error accumulation, leading to instability in answer quality. To address this, we propose an advantage-guided gating framework that dynamically intervenes in and corrects deviations during the reasoning process. Specifically, we model step-by-step reasoning as a finite-horizon decision process and introduce Monte Carlo value evaluation on the reasoning tree to provide intermediate supervision signals. The framework includes Step-Advantage Gate and Trajectory-Advantage Gate, which dynamically select high-value reasoning steps and high-quality complete reasoning trajectories, respectively. During training, we perform supervised learning for the gates using reasoning trees generated via multi-branch sampling, and combine shared-parameter initialization with task-specific heads to achieve cross-task robustness and diversity. During inference, the model greedily selects high-value prefix reasoning steps while choosing the optimal reasoning head based on the problem type, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of the final answer. Furthermore, we constructed the Reasoning-Tree-160k dataset and performed two-stage learning on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this advantage-guided gating framework effectively enhances the performance of benchmark MLLMs in visual-based spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. The code is open to the public for research: https://github.com/LingLin-ll/Advantage-Guided-Gate.
Ling Lin, Yang Bai, Congcong Zhu et al.· 0 citations
GUI Visual Grounding is a fundamental capability for GUI agents. Existing models typically freeze their parameters after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to unseen interfaces. Although recent methods attempt to adapt models via test-time reinforcement learning, they cannot reflect upon failed exploration. To overcome this, we propose a Test-Time Self-Evolving framework that enables models to improve after deployment without human-annotated ground truth. It constructs a closed-loop of Exploration, Evaluation, Reflection, and Internalization. Specifically, the agent first explores unseen interfaces by predicting grounding coordinates for given instructions. To evaluate these explorations, we introduce an MLLM-based Reflector to assess the generated results and provide the corresponding reasoning reflections. To internalize reflection knowledge into the model weights, we propose Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation, which translates high-level reasoning into dense token-level supervision via a conditioned self-teacher. Furthermore, we design a Contrastive Calibration method to prevent incorrect auto-regressive prefixes from corrupting the supervisory signals during failed explorations. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 7.4% over the base model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to successfully exploit on-policy self-distillation for test-time adaptation in GUI visual grounding. By filling the gap in post-deployment adaptation, our framework completes the self-evolving capability of GUI agents. The code will be released.
AC-VLA is introduced, a plug-and-play Action Compositional learning framework comprising two architecture-agnostic components that achieves a ~28% absolute improvement on compositional OOD tasks while maintaining near-perfect in-distribution performance.
Xiaojiang Peng, Kai Peng, Jie Lu et al.· arXiv.org· 2 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
