# Less is More: Lean yet Powerful Vision-Language Model for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00060/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 13 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)
- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies](https://mlsanity.com/driving/reasoning-vla-and-vlm-driving-policies/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [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)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)
- [EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23262/) (2024)
- [OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23463/) (2025)
- [Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22313/) (2024)
- [OpenEMMA: Open-Source Multimodal Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15208/) (2024)
- [Navigation-Guided Sparse Scene Representation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18341/) (2024)
- [VERDI: VLM-Embedded Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15925/) (2025)
- [doScenes: An Autonomous Driving Dataset with Natural Language Instruction for Human Interaction and Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05893/) (2024)
- [LightEMMA: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00284/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we reconceptualize autonomous driving as a generalized language problem and formulate the trajectory planning task as next waypoint prediction. We introduce Max-V1, a novel framework for one-stage end-to-end autonomous driving, named in tribute to the renowned Dutch racing driver Max Verstappen. Our framework presents a single-pass generation paradigm that aligns with the inherent sequentiality of driving. This approach leverages the generative capacity of the Vision-Language Model (VLM) to enable end-to-end trajectory prediction directly from front-view camera input. The efficacy of this method is underpinned by a principled supervision strategy derived from statistical modeling. This provides a well-defined learning objective, which makes the framework highly amenable to mastering complex driving policies through imitation learning from large-scale expert demonstrations. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes dataset, delivering an overall improvement of over 30% compared to prior baselines. Furthermore, it exhibits superior generalization performance on cross-domain datasets acquired from diverse vehicles, demonstrating notable potential for cross-vehicle robustness and adaptability. With these empirical strengths, this work introduces a model that enables fundamental driving behaviors, laying the foundation for the development of more capable self-driving agents. Code will be available upon publication.