https://embodied-ai-radar.com/robots/vehicle.xml 2026-11-10T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12767 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Autonomous vehicles track planned trajectories close to obstacles. Unknown disturbances make them deviate from these trajectories. With a bound on the tracking error that disturbances can cause, a planned trajectory can be certified as safe before execution. Existing set-based methods bound the tracking error by one invariant ellipsoid for the whole trajectory or by intervals, which are both conservative. For aerial and space vehicles, the tracking error evolves on a matrix Lie group with nonlinear dynamics. However, for group-affine systems, the error dynamics are linear in Lie algebra …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12382 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Autoregressive VLA planning usually predicts continuous trajectories as the final output, but driving instructions often describe actions rather than ego states, which weakens direct conditioning on the final continuous trajectory. We address this gap with TrajCond, which introduces a discrete trajectory-geometric condition for VLA planning. Specifically, we represent TrajCond as a 1D-Brohan differential action trajectory and learn it with a two-stage training framework before final continuous trajectory prediction. With the simultaneous autoregressive generation of discrete and numeric …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11856 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Fleets of driving vision-language-action (VLA) models are developed one domain at a time: each operator finetunes a shared base model on private data, producing specialized experts that are costly to consolidate into a single model. Weight merging loses accuracy as heterogeneous domains accumulate, and dense mixture-of-experts routing is prohibitively expensive to combine them. We present DeltaForge, to our knowledge the first post-hoc mixture-of-experts VLA for driving, which consolidates N independently finetuned per-domain models into a single multi-domain model from their weights and a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11690 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) integrate laboratory robotics and automation with AI-driven decision-making to close the design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycle. However, physical testbeds that combine off-the-shelf hardware and AI into a functioning closed-loop workflow remain in early stages of development, and their integration with commercial laboratory automation is comparatively less developed. In this work, we develop a physical testbed that assembles and integrates commercially available laboratory automation instruments and demonstrate continuous, closed-loop, autonomous operation over …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11516 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

World models allow autonomous vehicles to imagine the consequences of candidate actions before execution, but their reliability depends on the futures represented in their training data. We identify a survivorship bias in driving world models: because the futures recorded in prevailing driving datasets almost always end safely, existing models often imagine benign outcomes even when a collision is imminent. We introduce a neutral world model (NWM) that learns both routine and safety-critical futures from a mixture of routine driving and real accident videos with a bounding-box-guided …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10720 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as end-to-end driving planners, yet they suffer from cross-city domain shift. Existing methods treat this shift as a single quantity addressed by uniform alignment or single-site editing. We challenge this view on two counts: (i) domain shift in VLM trajectory planners is inherently structured across modality and layer, and (ii) a locate-then-repair recipe matched to this structure outperforms every uniform-objective baseline. We analyse domain shift via activation patching and uncover two regularities. (F1) Modality axis. Image and text …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09888 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Scenario-based simulation is central to evaluating autonomous-driving policies, but a scenario scripted before execution (i.e., with predetermined, fixed actor routes and speeds) may not preserve its intended interaction once the tested ego policy responds in closed loop. Scripted scenarios cannot adapt to unanticipated ego behavior, while learned traffic actors may remain reactive without reliably realizing a particular scenario intent. We introduce a scenario orchestrator that continuously monitors the joint traffic state and adapts non-ego actors through re-timing, re-routing, and role …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08449 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Models for physical AI tasks, such as robotics and autonomous driving, need not reason solely in language. They can use visual plans--points, bounding boxes, and trajectories--to represent spatial goals and anticipate motion. However, autoregressive vision-language models generate these plans one coordinate token at a time, making richer predictions increasingly costly. We introduce VFlash, a method for fast, accurate visual planning through Flash Primitive Decoding. VFlash exploits the known structure of visual primitives to predict their coordinates jointly, using a lightweight drafter that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08111 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

World-action models (WAMs) jointly model future traffic states and driving actions for end-to-end autonomous driving in intelligent transportation systems. However, their action learning remains dominated by expert-trajectory imitation, leaving unsafe alternatives close to expert trajectories insufficiently constrained. To improve WAM robustness in safety-critical scenarios, we propose NegWAM, a safety post-training framework for unified WAMs that learns explicit safety boundaries from near-expert failure trajectories. NegWAM constructs negative trajectories that are geometrically close to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07912 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

World action models (WAMs) for autonomous driving couple the driving policy and the visual world model in a single generative network whose objectives are fixed post-training. Conditioning on a new driving objective requires retraining. We study energy guidance as a general mechanism and present GuidedWAM, a model-agnostic framework for injecting driving objectives into frozen WAMs at sampling time. Our framework constructs each objective as differentiable energies on the sampler's intermediate clean-action estimate, which needs only forward access to the frozen model, and is stabilized by …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06911 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Self-Driving Chemical Laboratories (SDCLs) are moving chemical experimentation toward embodied automation, where machines must perceive laboratory scenes, reason about experimental states, and act under physical, procedural, and safety constraints. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as embodied brains for such systems, existing laboratory benchmarks mainly focus on safety, anomaly detection, or general scientific understanding, leaving their execution-oriented embodied capabilities underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BEAKER, a Benchmark for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06627 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

We present a shared framework that adapts Cosmos world foundation models for real-time interactive world simulation in Physical AI. By streaming visual observations in response to actions and scene controls, the framework enables users and embodied agents to interact with evolving virtual environments. It supports both predicting the visual consequences of actions and generating observations from physical state maintained by an external simulator. We demonstrate this approach across camera navigation and robot manipulation, controllable video transfer, and multi-view autonomous vehicle (AV) …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06204 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

With the rapid development of autonomous driving systems (ADSes), real-world roads are evolving into mixed-traffic environments where autonomous vehicles (AVs) and other traffic participants (e.g., human-driven vehicles (HDVs), cyclists, and pedestrians) coexist and interact with each other. However, current ADSes still incur various safety violations in mixed traffic scenarios, raising a strong demand for runtime safety assurance frameworks that can continuously monitor hazards and prevent potential violations. Existing ego-centric assurance approaches are insufficient for mixed traffic, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05448 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Large language models understand passengers' driving commands, but as driving agents they reason in generated text for seconds and must infer each action's consequences implicitly from the scene. We present Jev-AD, which pairs Jev, a typed decision model that answers predefined questions with probabilities, not generated text, with a language world model that predicts for every candidate action how nearby vehicles move over the next two seconds. Code turns these predictions into foreseen consequences, which Jev compares instead of inferring them from coordinates. In simulated highway merging …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05072 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Although existing candidate trajectory evaluators have substantially improved end-to-end planning accuracy, their underlying mechanism remains suboptimal. Model-based evaluators typically make scoring future-aware by explicitly predicting candidate-conditioned future states over the planning horizon, which we term rollout. However, rollout incurs high inference cost and accumulates prediction errors. We argue that planning does not require reconstructing a full future scene for each candidate, but only future-relevant information for reliable comparison. We therefore propose RFWorld, a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03067 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Real-world driving requires context-aware decision-making. Existing end-to-end driving benchmarks primarily assess trajectory quality through safety, compliance, comfort, and driving progress, leaving context-dependent decision-making insufficiently characterized. To fill this gap, we present PlanContext, a benchmark for evaluating in-context driving decision-making. PlanContext constructs paired evaluations by varying high-level driving intentions while keeping the observed scene fixed, enabling a natural and controllable assessment of context-dependent decision-making. We further define six …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02240 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Safe navigation in interactive traffic requires autonomous vehicles to reason about unobservable human characteristics and the reciprocal nature of multi-agent interactions. Traditional architectures often decouple prediction from planning, leading to the "Frozen Robot Problem" or unsafe maneuvers under high ambiguity because they treat risk assessment and information acquisition as independent objectives. We argue that the notion of safety should not remain static but must instead dynamically co-evolve with the system's internal confidence: the robot should actively clarify ambiguity when …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01283 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

End-to-end planners decode the ego trajectory either by coordinate regression, which is fast but blends plausible maneuvers into one trajectory that may follow none of them, or by diffusion and flow matching, which model the trajectory distribution but need several inference steps. Drifting models move this iteration into training: a one-step generator learns to follow an attraction--repulsion field between generated and ground-truth samples. Drifting was developed for class-conditional image generation, where every class supplies many positive samples. In planning, every scene is its own …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00718 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Vision-language action (VLA) models excel for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet their tendency to over-invoke chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning mirrors a human cognitive pitfall: overthinking. Just as deliberate reasoning can slow or mislead human judgment in routine tasks, excessive CoT in VLA incurs unnecessary compute overhead and can paradoxically degrade planning performance. Recent research tackles this via adaptive reasoning, which dynamically modulates inference complexity by selectively triggering CoT for complex scenes while responding directly to routine ones. While prior adaptive …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41185 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving models achieve strong planning performance but remain largely opaque, limiting observability and trust. We apply mechanistic interpretability to E2E driving by training Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) on the internal activations of a simple, single-camera end-to-end path planning model. Unsupervised clustering of SAE latents reveals interpretable structure aligned with route intent, vehicle speed, and braking behavior, recovering route intent with 98.3% accuracy without supervision. Through paired counterfactual image edits, we further show that specific SAE …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39547 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPS), including autonomous vehicles and UAVs, increasingly incorporate foundation models, yet fragmented assurance practices provide insufficient support for system-level guarantees. We argue that restoring engineering control across stochastic neural, symbolic, and physical boundaries requires a shift from model-centric evaluation to system-level assurance. We introduce the Foundation Model Assurance Stack, connecting three directions: (i) neuro-symbolic architectures that constrain foundation models through explicit symbolic world models, reasoning …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39283 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Online vectorized map construction provides autonomous vehicles with essential, real-time semantic and geometric scene understanding. While leveraging prior maps presents an opportunity to improve accuracy, they are often biased due to outdated information or temporary road changes. Existing methods, which typically treat priors as fully reliable or only consider limited noise patterns, suffer severe performance degradation when these priors are imperfect. To address this, we propose PriorMaskMap, a robust framework for prior-guided vectorized map construction. Its first innovation is a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37818 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Robots, autonomous vehicles, and consumer 360{\deg} cameras use fisheye lenses for wide fields of view (FoVs). Simulation-ready digital twins require photorealistic rendering across the full FoV and an aligned collision mesh. However, prior fisheye Gaussian Splatting methods only rasterize up to 180{\deg} and do not produce meshes, while Gaussian surface reconstruction methods assume pinhole training images. We present GOFish, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting surface reconstruction method to train directly on fisheye images, rasterize FoVs beyond 180{\deg}, and extract an aligned mesh from the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37217 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Autonomous vehicles in enclosed spaces such as tunnels and mines rely on range maps that smoke, dust and fog make inaccurate. Conformal prediction calibrates a keepout around the mapped walls that covers the true unsafe set at a chosen probability. Typically an unmodified planner treats the keepout as an inflated obstacle, and nothing ensures that the vehicle can stop before the keepout as it moves when sensing degrades. In narrow passages this margin and the planner's buffer close the route, and existing remedies recover reach by relaxing the coverage level. This paper conditions the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37153 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Reliable real-time 3D object detection based on LiDAR and camera data is critical for safety in autonomous driving, where systems must accurately perceive their surroundings with minimal latency. Many state-of-the-art systems achieve high-quality detection results but fail to meet real-time constraints, limiting their practical use. To address this challenge, we propose FastBEVFusion, a simple, fast, and robust fusion system for 3D object detection. Based on modality-specific features, FastBEVFusion projects these features into semi-aligned modality-specific BEV spaces, without relying on a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36761 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) are laboratory systems that couple experimental planning, automated execution, and measurement feedback in a closed loop. Integrating flexible robot control with the typed application programming interfaces (APIs) and continuous measurements exposed by laboratory instruments remains an execution-interface challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a traceable framework comprising four components: LAM (Lab Action Model), OpenSDL, Safe-SDL, and L3-Bench. LAM is a proposed measurement-conditioned policy architecture that extends vision-language-action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36289 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Independently developed autonomous agents, such as autonomous vehicles, must guarantee joint compatibility, such as safety and task-completion requirements, when they operate in a shared environment. Existing methods require a centrally designed specification, or interaction mechanism before any agent is deployed. However, such centralized design is unrealistic when agent designs are confidential to their developers, and it is not flexible enough to accommodate future agent designs. We study a bi-level structure in which a regulator coordinates developers by publishing seed agents, and each …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36143 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Coding agents can adapt robotic software by revising executable programs, but successful responses to an evolving opponent may not remain effective. We present a framework for program-level adversarial co-adaptive self-play in which coding agents generate attacks and defenses from tested opponent code and mission feedback, without model fine-tuning. Environment-specific interfaces support external programs for autonomous driving and SDK-level defenses for humanoid locomotion. Two eight-generation case studies reveal concrete software responses: a driving defender introduces direct-actuation …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36079 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

End-to-end autonomous driving has predominantly relied on open-loop imitation learning for training, which presents two limitations. First, expert demonstrations show only one behavior per scenario, so the model cannot learn alternative valid behaviors and, in turn, cannot adapt to user-specified preferences at test time. Second, noise or ambiguity in these demonstrations can produce inconsistent, unreliable supervision for the end-to-end models. Driving is inherently multi-modal: multiple different behaviors can be valid responses to the same scene, and this diversity arises largely from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35850 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Direct-policy World Action Models (WAM) have demonstrated the benefits of decoupling action generation from explicit future visual prediction for efficient inference in autonomous driving and embodied control. However, they still require tens of denoising steps to achieve competitive action quality, incurring substantial latency and hindering real-time deployment. Simply reducing the number of denoising steps will collapse the nonlinear multi-step denoising trajectory into coarse updates, substantially degrading action quality. To reduce the denoising steps while enabling real-time action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35630 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

In autonomous driving, robot teleoperation serves as a critical safety fallback mechanism, requiring operators to assume direct control in the event of system failure. While recent research has pivoted toward high-level supervisory control or simulation-based studies, these approaches often fail to capture the physical dynamics and sensory demands of driving a full-scale vehicle. To address this gap, we evaluated the impact of spatial data representation on operator performance using a real car-sized vehicle in a field experiment with $N = 18$ participants. We compared three visualization …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35448 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

End-to-end driving models perform well on standard benchmarks but collide frequently in safety-critical scenarios. We present a failure-mode analysis on NeuroNCAP which shows that 95.9% of DiffusionDrive's collisions are planning failures despite reliable detection, pinpointing the bottleneck in planning rather than perception. We attribute this to a fundamental data imbalance, as safety-critical interactions are rare in real driving logs, so planners are hardly ever trained on them. We close this gap with a novel model-aware framework that generates safety-critical training scenes against a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34466 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Achieving safety in autonomous driving through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a critical yet challenging task due to non-stationarity, partial observability, and the need for effective coordination among agents. Although earlier cooperative MARL methods have aimed to improve coordination by sharing encoded state observations, we find these strategies are insufficient in safety-critical scenarios. To address this gap, we present IntNet, a novel MARL framework that enhances safety by incorporating the transmission of vehicle intent and adaptive communication scheduling into a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33760 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Simulation is widely used in autonomous-driving validation, but matching task outputs between real and synthetic images does not guarantee that a system relies on the same visual evidence. This creates a validation gap for transfer, especially in safety-critical perception functions. We present Concept-Decisive Feature Fidelity (C-DFF), a concept-level mechanism-parity diagnostic for paired real-synthetic evaluation. Starting from decisive evidence extracted from a frozen system-under-test (SUT), C-DFF projects that evidence into a shared semantic concept space using off-the-shelf …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33186 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) operating in dynamic, challenging conditions such as intersections and roundabouts must guarantee collision avoidance under uncertainty while maintaining real-time feasibility. Most existing planners struggle to simultaneously guarantee both requirements. Chance-constrained formulations embed safety constraints directly in the optimization but become infeasible as uncertainty compounds; deterministic planners provide feasible solutions but fail to address the uncertainty that causes collisions; end-to-end learned policies provide neither guarantee in an interpretable …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32666 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Achieving accurate, real-time lane-keeping control during high-speed cornering on large-curvature roads while ensuring robust vehicle stability is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this study developed a robust offset-free model predictive control (OF-MPC) framework for vision-based autonomous vehicle lane-keeping. The regulation problem in this framework is solved using several algorithms. Numerical simulation results indicated that the interpolation-tube-based constrained iterative linear quadratic regulator (itube-CILQR) algorithm outperformed solvers …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30953 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Driving vision-language-action (VLA) models bring an appealing form of explainability to a safety-critical domain, since a system that can state the reasons for its maneuvers offers the transparency that deployment and public trust in autonomous driving demand. These models read the world into language before they act on it, describing the scene and reasoning over it in text that ranges from chain-of-thought to multi-stage question answering on the way to a trajectory. That framing quietly assumes two separable properties, namely that the trajectory follows the generated reasoning and that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30737 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Modern autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), such as self-driving cars, operate in increasingly complex environments while expected to maintain high reliability. The black-box nature of many of these systems makes it impossible to fully verify their behavior prior to deployment. When a failure occurs, it is important to analyze it to guide improvements to system robustness. A recent work introduced the novel concept of leveraging the framework of actual causality for CPS failure explanation. However, that work considered only a discrete, binary causal model that cannot capture continuous …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30528 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Predicting surrounding vehicles' lane-change intentions enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate potential hazards and respond proactively rather than relying solely on reactive maneuvers. This study investigates the benefits of integrating lane-change prediction, based on knowledge graph embeddings and Bayesian inference, into autonomous vehicle decision-making. Three driving strategies are evaluated in risky merging scenarios simulated in CARLA: reactive driving, prediction-based longitudinal action, and prediction-based lateral action. The proposed prediction model anticipates the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30437 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

This paper presents an integrated control framework for high-speed platooning of articulated vehicles, combining advanced longitudinal and lateral control strategies to address the challenges of safe and efficient autonomous driving. A novel proof of string stability for the proposed longitudinal control algorithm, based on a PID framework, ensures robust inter-vehicle distance regulation even under dynamic operating conditions. Additionally, an arc-length-based longitudinal error formulation enhances the applicability of the control system for curved roads, making it realistic for diverse …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30319 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and real-world deployments. Its standard training recipe, however, is expensive across all existing paradigms: imitation learning requires fleet-scale driving logs whose behavior distribution only thinly covers the safety-critical tail; closed-loop reinforcement learning in a photorealistic simulator, while offering diverse behaviors, is bottlenecked by sample-efficiency, per-step cost of rendering, and a forward pass through a large vision backbone. Self-play in vectorized simulators changes the economics: …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29676 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Learning motion planning policies that remain reliable under closed-loop execution is a central challenge in Autonomous Driving (AD). Imitation Learning (IL) scales well to large AD datasets but suffers from distribution shift, causal confusion, and compounding errors under closed-loop execution. In contrast, Reinforcement Learning (RL) typically requires handcrafted rule-based rewards and massive simulation. We study a simple closed-loop IL framework that uses RL purely as an optimization tool, guided by a trajectory-distance reward derived from logged expert data. We refer to this training …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28696 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Most high-performing end-to-end autonomous driving agents (ADAs) are developed for the CARLA Leaderboard, tightly coupling them to CARLA's APIs, sensor layouts, coordinate systems, and internal clock. Reusing these models on real datasets, alternative simulators, or physical platforms necessitates substantial manual re-engineering. We present PCLA-Bridge, a deployable tool that runs unmodified CARLA Leaderboard agents from any sensor source to any control destination without an active CARLA server. With PCLA-Bridge handling dependency isolation, tensor marshalling, routing, and synthetic …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27732 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) face significant challenges in roundabout navigation due to dense traffic interactions and unpredictable agent behaviors, necessitating high levels of adaptability and safety. While the combination of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers a promising approach, existing frameworks suffer from a structural mismatch where pointwise RL decisions fail to align with MPC's trajectory level optimization, and often lack rigorous safety guarantees. This work proposes RLTrajGen-PPMPC-CBF, a hierarchical framework for safe, smooth …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26390 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Every driving scene is logged once, but driving is one-to-many: the scene determines which behaviors are feasible, while an instruction selects among them. A log records only the action taken, leaving no direct supervision for alternative feasible actions or instructions the scene cannot support. Consequently, a policy that ignores language and one that follows it without regard to scene constraints can fit the same data. We present Cartender, which learns from the drives not taken. Counterfactual Branching constructs matched and mismatched instruction-action pairs from real recordings …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25734 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Autonomous driving fundamentally demands dense understanding of visual, semantic, and geometric information, yet existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained with sparse supervision such as language instructions or trajectory signals. This direct mapping from dense visual observations to sparse representations forces the model to compress or even discard critical scene information essential for safe driving. We argue that this limitation does not stem from insufficient model capacity, but from the lack of explicit mechanisms that encourage the formation of dense world …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25068 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Resource-constrained robots and autonomous vehicles need scene memories that localize a camera and render nearby views without a desktop GPU. Scene-coordinate regression (SCR) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) fit because they avoid an SfM stage, but ACEsplat-style pipelines are GPU-centered, and moving them to an edge FPGA is hard because SCR is pose-sensitive and 3DGS rendering is irregular and capacity-sensitive. We present LENS, an edge scene-memory acceleration system on the AMD KR260 that brings an ACEsplat-style workload to a low-power FPGA/ARM platform. Rather than proposing a new …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24590 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for autonomous driving. However, the massive parameter scale of VLAs strains onboard computational resources during real-time inference. This directly increases energy consumption and limits vehicle battery range, making it critical to minimize computational overhead without compromising driving capability and explainability. Current research on efficient VLA-based driving focuses on sequential adaptation (\textit{e.g.}, Chain-of-Thought and token adjustment), leaving structural adaptation underexplored despite parameter …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23886 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

End-to-end autonomous driving systems have achieved rapid progress by learning unified policies that map sensor observations directly to driving trajectories. However, once deployed, these systems typically remain frozen: they may repeat similar decisions in similar scenes, and failures can only be addressed through costly data collection and retraining. This sharply contrasts with human drivers, who improve lifelong through experience, memory, and reflection. In this work, we ask whether autonomous driving systems can achieve similar post-deployment self-evolution to human drivers. We …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23885 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Diffusion models have become a dominant paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing planners organize trajectory generation along the Gaussian-noise axis, treating driving utility only as an auxiliary guidance or selection signal. We instead formulate diffusion along a driving-quality axis. We propose QualiDrive, which constructs scene-specific quality ladders by ranking observed trajectories according to measured driving utility and learns to reverse this ordered degradation through ordered low-to-high-quality refinement. Each reverse step is conditioned on the scene, ego state, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23826 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) accelerate scientific discovery by automating experimental execution and optimization. AI agents can increasingly propose new experiments, but existing SDLs can only run the procedures they were built for. Adapting them to a new experiment still takes extensive manual engineering, which makes laboratory flexibility the bottleneck for scaling discovery. We introduce the self-building laboratory (SBL), which designs, configures, and operates its own laboratory setup given a high-level scientific goal. SBL starts from whatever already exists, from an empty room …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23262 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Candidate-based end-to-end driving planners reason over a finite set of trajectory hypotheses. However, for sparse planners, a limited candidate set may provide insufficient support for scene-relevant maneuvers, while fixed downstream candidate budgets do not account for prediction uncertainty. To address these challenges, we introduce Expand-and-Prune, a test-time framework that jointly adapts candidate support and capacity without updating learned parameters. The framework expands the native candidate set using semantic driving intent and temporally propagated predictions and then uses …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22675 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Friction uncertainty is a significant challenge for autonomous vehicle control, undermining feasibility and performance. This paper proposes a novel two-layer control framework to achieve vehicle motion control under large friction uncertainty by combining optimization-based planning with indirect adaptive robust control (IARC). The upper layer solves a constrained optimal control problem to generate a feasible trajectory that satisfies all the constraints in a time-optimal manner along the desired path. The lower layer, IARC, adapts the unknown parameters related to friction uncertainty and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22450 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Three dimensional modeling for autonomous driving must continuously estimate road geometry, obstacle occupancy, traffic participant behavior, and observational uncertainty under limited computational resources. Existing reconstruction methods can synthesize realistic novel views, but visual fidelity does not sufficiently characterize the geometric reliability required for driving. Generative world models can expand scenarios and predict future observations, yet may introduce content unsupported by measurements. We propose DriveWorld3D, a framework combining temporal video learning, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21984 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Autonomous driving planning requires selecting trajectories that remain safe, rule-compliant, and comfortable under complex multi-agent interactions, yet robust closed-loop decision making in planning-critical scenes remains challenging. Existing diffusion- and RL-based planners often rely on generic rewards and use relational structure mainly for representation, limiting how planning-critical rollouts shape policy improvement. We present GRID-Planner, a graph--reward integrated diffusion planning framework that aligns generative planning with structured relational signals. Specifically, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20873 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Vehicles that lose control at the handling limit through icing, hydroplaning, or an abrupt evasive maneuver fall outside the operating envelope of production safety systems such as electronic stability control, which focus on preventing instability rather than recovering from it. Expert drivers regain authority in these conditions by drifting. Existing autonomous recovery approaches are validated on idealized scenarios, define "recovered" states empirically and inconsistently, or rely on offline-planned trajectories rather than acting online. We address these gaps by first training a racing …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20609 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are gaining attention in autonomous driving, inheriting commonsense priors from large language models (LLMs) and widening the navigation interface from a fixed command set to free-form natural-language instructions. However, this open-ended interface exposes a new vulnerability surface: an inattentive driver may issue instructions that are unsafe given the current scene, and a malicious user may issue dangerous ones on purpose. We present the first benchmark suite that evaluates navigation following and conflict awareness together, along with adversarial …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20203 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

This paper investigates the use of Behavior Cloning (BC) for autonomous driving from a bird's-eye view (BEV) perspective in simulated urban environments. BC uses supervised learning to mimic expert driving behaviors. Previous works have applied BC in the CARLA simulator but did not fully address the challenges of traffic light compliance. Our approach enhances BC by integrating a kernel density estimator to adjust training sample weights based on action density, thereby improving the learning of rare but critical actions such as stopping at red lights and accelerating at green lights, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19224 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Surface navigation on the Moon is subject to extreme illumination contrast and deployment-time perceptual disturbances. While modular navigation pipelines have long supported planetary rover navigation, robustness is compromised by measurement errors that propagate through hand-engineered components. End-to-end learned policies are an alternative approach to navigation, which maps observations directly to control actions without intermediate components. Vision-language-action models, in particular, have driven significant breakthroughs in robotics and autonomous vehicle research. By …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18866 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Safe autonomous driving requires more than accurate planning at a single frame: it demands reliable closed-loop execution in dynamic environments. Although end-to-end driving policies have advanced rapidly, the accumulated closed-loop errors, especially in unseen scenarios, can push vehicles into states from which the same policy struggles to recover. We address the challenge by treating closed-loop driving safety as a test-time execution problem. We introduce AutoAgent0, an agentic runtime and harness framework that augments existing driving experts with complementary detection skills, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18686 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

3D semantic occupancy prediction is crucial for autonomous driving, but camera-based methods degrade in low-light conditions and LiDAR-based methods are sensitive to adverse weather. 4D radar is more robust, yet its sparsity and the high cost of radar tensor processing limit its use. We propose Radar Geometric-Semantic Occupancy Prediction (RadarGSOcc), an efficient framework that directly processes 4D radar tensors by separately extracting geometric and semantic features, including Doppler information, with a deformable attention-based geometric refinement module as its key component. We …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18167 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved remarkable progress by planning trajectories directly from raw sensor data. Yet the step from planning to control still relies on hand-tuned tracking controllers that block the gradient path from vehicle motion back to the network. This gap stems from non-differentiable vehicle dynamics, aliased supervision from coarsely sampled expert labels, rate mismatch between high-rate control and low-rate re-planning, and vehicle model discrepancies between training and deployment. This paper proposes DIVA (Differentiable Identified Vehicle dynamics for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17903 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and future scene evolution for autonomous driving. However, effectively integrating both capabilities for trajectory generation remains challenging. In this work, we propose DriveWLA, a unified World-Language-Action model based on Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) that jointly models semantic understanding, future scene dynamics, and trajectory generation. DriveWLA consists of three experts: a World Expert for future prediction, a Language Expert for semantic understanding, and an Action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17806 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Collision rate remains a dominant metric for evaluating autonomous driving trajectory safety, but its binary nature obscures substantial safety differences among collision-free trajectories. Existing surrogate-safety metrics provide finer-grained assessments, yet often trade off physical interpretability against adaptivity to interaction context. We introduce FutureRisk, a continuous metric that quantifies the latent future risk of a trajectory by how closely and persistently its realized interactions approach unsafe states. At its core, our Context-Adaptive Risk Model (CARM) combines a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17799 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Online reinforcement learning (RL) enables driving policies to adapt to changing deployment conditions, but requires safe exploration throughout training. Safety filtering alone does not ensure stable policy improvement or reduced dependence on corrections. We propose Safe Online Adaptive Refinement (SOAR-Flow), a framework for safe and stable online fine-tuning of offline-initialized Flow-based driving policies. A control barrier function (CBF)--model predictive control (MPC) filter corrects potentially unsafe actions before execution. To support stable policy updates, we introduce …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17688 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Occupancy world models provide a structured, metric representation of future driving scenes, making them a promising basis for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing occupancy-aware planners typically couple occupancy prediction and action generation through either hierarchical coupling or parallel multi-task learning. Hierarchical methods use occupancy either as a fully predicted future preceding action generation or as an action-conditioned rollout for trajectory evaluation, whereas parallel multi-task methods predict occupancy alongside planning through a separate branch or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16985 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models show strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by leveraging world knowledge and understanding to excel in long-tail scenarios. However, current VLAs have two limitations: 1) Degeneration into vision-action (VA) models. For low latency, regression/flow-based methods directly generate actions but underuse VLM understanding, causing unsafe, unexplainable actions. 2) Autoregressive high latency. Autoregressive methods sequentially generate chain-of-thought (CoT) and action tokens, fully leveraging VLM understanding, but high latency hinders …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16908 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

End-to-end driving requires rich spatiotemporal representations to support scene understanding and trajectory planning under strict latency constraints. However, most systems initialize their visual encoders from generic image pretraining and densely process all patch tokens for each camera view and input frame, limiting both representation quality and inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we present ConDenseDrive, a knowledge-dense and token-sparse visual encoder for end-to-end autonomous driving. Our three-stage framework first makes the encoder knowledge-dense by distilling …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16634 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models increasingly use natural-language instructions to condition autonomous driving behavior. Yet existing closed-loop benchmarks primarily measure route completion, safety, and rule compliance, leaving a fundamental question unresolved: does language actually determine which feasible behavior the vehicle executes? A trajectory may be safe and successful while still violating or even ignoring the passenger's instruction. To address this, we introduce \ltd, a benchmark designed to directly test this capability. Its key evaluation unit, the paired …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16478 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Deep reinforcement learning has shown strong potential for vision-based autonomous driving, but policies trained in simulation often suffer severe performance degradation when deployed in the real world. Existing sim-to-real methods commonly address this gap through image-transfer-based domain adaptation or policy-agnostic domain randomisation. However, the former requires laborious acquisition of target-domain data and is often limited to the deployment domain, whereas the latter introduces unguided perturbations that may not reflect the underlying sim-to-real discrepancy, leading to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16139 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Learned world models for autonomous driving operate in unconstrained latent spaces, yet the physical systems they represent are governed by strict non-holonomic constraints: ground vehicles cannot realize instantaneous pure lateral motion. We study long-horizon latent rollout modeling for autonomous driving and ask whether rollout quality can be improved by assigning a motion-aware geometry to latent transitions, rather than by redesigning the predictor architecture. Starting from an unconstrained latent rollout baseline, we introduce Directional Pullback Regularization (DPR), a training time …