# Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies

Area: [End-to-end autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/driving/reasoning-vla-and-vlm-driving-policies/

## Key facts

- Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies: 232 papers on arXiv since 2023 (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- 85 of its 232 mapped papers (37%) cite “AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning” (2025, arXiv 2506.13757).
- 71 of its 232 mapped papers (31%) cite “EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving” (2024, arXiv 2410.23262).
- 20 new papers 17 Sep–14 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13757/) (2025), cited by 85 papers here
- [EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23262/) (2024), cited by 71 papers here
- [ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19755/) (2025), cited by 67 papers here
- [OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23463/) (2025), cited by 63 papers here
- [Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22313/) (2024), cited by 57 papers here
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025), cited by 53 papers here
- [ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08052/) (2025), cited by 50 papers here
- [AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07608/) (2025), cited by 45 papers here
- [OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04348/) (2025), cited by 41 papers here
- [Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00088/) (2025), cited by 41 papers here

## New (17 Sep–14 Oct)

- [SafeDriveVLA: Navigation-Conditioned World Model Dreaming for Conflict-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20609/) (2026-10-14)
- [DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17903/) (2026-10-13)
- [AUGUstus: Autonomous Driving VLA Model with Unified Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16985/) (2026-10-12)
- [Language2Drive: Do Vision-Language-Action Models Really Follow the Instructions in Autonomous Driving?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16634/) (2026-10-12)
- [YOUDrive: Driving Style as a Composable Direction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14802/) (2026-10-10)
- [Reflect-VLA: Internalizing Reflective Guidance via Dual-Path On-Policy Self-Distillation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13453/) (2026-10-09)
- [Mind the Temporal Gap: Evaluating Video Models for Temporal Understanding in Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12575/) (2026-10-08)
- [Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10390/) (2026-10-07)
- [Not All Uncertainty Matters: Simulation-in-the-Loop Fast-Slow Reasoning for Decision-Critical Autonomous Driving System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09520/) (2026-10-07)
- [Grounding What Shapes the Plan: Rethinking Groundedness for Physical Intelligence in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07521/) (2026-10-05)
- [Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38641/) (2026-09-29)
- [Data-Efficient Adaptation of a Driving VLA to Class 8 Trucks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38570/) (2026-09-29)
- [doPlan: A Variable-Horizon Dataset for Multi-Stage Language-Conditioned Planning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38028/) (2026-09-29)
- [Speed in the Blind Spot: An Interpretability Analysis of Dynamic Perception in VLMs for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37046/) (2026-09-29)
- [CAR-VLA: Complexity-Aware and Risk-Adaptive Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34387/) (2026-09-29)
- [RefineDrive: Reliable Failure-Guided Learning for Vision-Language-Action Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35078/) (2026-09-28)
- [CausalDriveBench: Evaluating Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32157/) (2026-09-26)
- [DriveHierarchy: A Benchmark for Diagnosing VLM Driving Capabilities from Open-Loop Understanding to Closed-Loop Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31814/) (2026-09-25)
- [AnchorReasoning: A Visual Grounding and Causal Reasoning Dataset in Long-Tail Autonomous Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28366/) (2026-09-23)
- [Less Language, More Latents: Annotation-Efficient VLAs for Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27747/) (2026-09-23)