mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

DiffVLA: Vision-Language Guided Diffusion Planning for Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2505.19381 ↗First posted 26 May 2025cs.AI cs.CV cs.ROcited by 64

On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Research interest in end-to-end autonomous driving has surged owing to its fully differentiable design integrating modular tasks, i.e. perception, prediction and planing, which enables optimization in pursuit of the ultimate goal. Despite the great potential of the end-to-end paradigm, existing methods suffer from several aspects including expensive BEV (bird's eye view) computation, action diversity, and sub-optimal decision in complex real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hybrid sparse-dense diffusion policy, empowered by a Vision-Language Model (VLM), called Diff-VLA. We explore the sparse diffusion representation for efficient multi-modal driving behavior. Moreover, we rethink the effectiveness of VLM driving decision and improve the trajectory generation guidance through deep interaction across agent, map instances and VLM output. Our method shows superior performance in Autonomous Grand Challenge 2025 which contains challenging real and reactive synthetic scenarios. Our methods achieves 45.0 PDMS.

Key facts. Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 15 of its 15 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

Builds on

15 of 15 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving22 Nov

Other references · 14

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  4. 2021BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-Viewcited by 713
  5. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
  6. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 485
  7. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 354
  8. 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representationcited by 241
  9. 2019CenterMask : Real-Time Anchor-Free Instance Segmentationcited by 201
  10. 2025OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Modelcited by 176
  11. 2024Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 156
  12. 2025Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidancecited by 141
2 more
  1. 2023Sparse4D v3: Advancing End-to-End 3D Detection and Trackingcited by 70
  2. 2025SparseMeXT Unlocking the Potential of Sparse Representations for HD Map Constructioncited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 23; 2026: 41.

64 papers.

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  1. 2025DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Drivingcited by 134
  2. 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 72
  3. 2025Discrete Diffusion in Large Language and Multimodal Models: A Surveycited by 61
  4. 2026DriveWorld-VLA: Unified Latent-Space World Modeling with Vision-Language-Action for Autonomous Drivingcited by 37
  5. 2025A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 34
  6. 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Futurecited by 33
  7. 2025TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 32
  8. 2025IRL-VLA: Training an Vision-Language-Action Policy via Reward World Modelcited by 31
  9. 2025GuideFlow: Constraint-Guided Flow Matching for Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 22
  10. 2026UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 19
  11. 2026DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 17
  12. 2025PRIX: Learning to Plan from Raw Pixels for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 16
38 more
  1. 2025WAM-Flow: Parallel Coarse-to-Fine Motion Planning via Discrete Flow Matching for Autonomous Drivingcited by 16
  2. 2025DrivePI: Spatial-aware 4D MLLM for Unified Autonomous Driving Understanding, Perception, Prediction and Planningcited by 15
  3. 2026NoRD: A Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model that Drives without Reasoningcited by 15
  4. 2025ResAD: Normalized Residual Trajectory Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 14
  5. 2025dVLM-AD: Enhance Diffusion Vision-Language-Model for Driving via Controllable Reasoningcited by 14
  6. 2026DVGT-2: Vision-Geometry-Action Model for Autonomous Driving at Scalecited by 13
  7. 2026ExploreVLA: Dense World Modeling and Exploration for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 12
  8. 2026CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 12
  9. 2026DynVLA: Learning World Dynamics for Action Reasoning in Autonomous Drivingcited by 11
  10. 2026Uni-World VLA: Interleaved World Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 11
  11. 2025UniUGP: Unifying Understanding, Generation, and Planing For End-to-end Autonomous Drivingcited by 10
  12. 2025RoboChemist: Long-Horizon and Safety-Compliant Robotic Chemical Experimentationcited by 9
  13. 2026Unifying Language-Action Understanding and Generation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 9
  14. 2026Test-Time Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Drivingcited by 7
  15. 2026Vega: Learning to Drive with Natural Language Instructionscited by 6
  16. 2026GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 6
  17. 2025A Knowledge-Driven Diffusion Policy for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Based on Expert Routingcited by 5
  18. 2025VDRive: Leveraging Reinforced VLA and Diffusion Policy for End-to-end Autonomous Drivingcited by 5
  19. 2025CoT4AD: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Explicit Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 5
  20. 2026HiST-VLA: A Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 5
  21. 2026Senna-2: Aligning VLM and End-to-End Driving Policy for Consistent Decision Making and Planningcited by 5
  22. 2025FlowDrive: Energy Flow Field for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 4
  23. 2026Fine-tuning is Not Enough: A Parallel Framework for Collaborative Imitation and Reinforcement Learning in End-to-end Autonomous Drivingcited by 4
  24. 2026HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Drivingcited by 4
  25. 2026ChainFlow-VLA: Causal Flow Planning with Vision-Language Modelscited by 4
  26. 2025DiffVLA++: Bridging Cognitive Reasoning and End-to-End Driving through Metric-Guided Alignmentcited by 3
  27. 2025Foundation Models for Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving: A Review of Progress and Open Challengescited by 3
  28. 2026Judge, Then Drive: A Critic-Centric Vision Language Action Framework for Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
  29. 2026VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
  30. 2025DiffSemanticFusion: Semantic Raster BEV Fusion for Autonomous Driving via Online HD Map Diffusioncited by 2
  31. 2025Autoregressive End-to-End Planning with Time-Invariant Spatial Alignment and Multi-Objective Policy Refinementcited by 2
  32. 2026LAD-Drive: Bridging Language and Trajectory with Action-Aware Diffusion Transformerscited by 2
  33. 2026UniUncer: Unified Dynamic Static Uncertainty for End to End Drivingcited by 2
  34. 2026IDOL: Inverse-Dynamics-Guided Future Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
  35. 2026PriorEye: Geospatial Visual Priors for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
  36. 2026OpenLongTail: Generative Scaling of Long-Tail Driving Datacited by 2
  37. 2026ETA-VLA: Efficient Token Adaptation via Temporal Fusion and Intra-LLM Sparsification for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 1
  38. 2026AnchorVLA: Bridging Discrete Decisions and Continuous Trajectories for Vision-Language-Action Planningcited by 1

50 most cited of 64 All 64 (JSON)

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  1. 2025WAM-Diff: A Masked Diffusion VLA Framework with MoE and Online Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
  2. 2026WAM-Diff2: Hierarchical AR-to-Diffusion Distillation for Highly Efficient Autonomous Driving VLA
  3. 2025VDT-Auto: End-to-end Autonomous Driving with VLM-Guided Diffusion Transformers
  4. 2025Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving
  5. 2026Fast-dDrive: Efficient Block-Diffusion VLM for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2026DriveFine: Refining-Augmented Masked Diffusion VLA for Precise and Robust Driving
  7. 2025ViLaD: A Large Vision Language Diffusion Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  8. 2025DiffAD: A Unified Diffusion Modeling Approach for Autonomous Driving