# DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12796/

## Key facts

- Cited by 134 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for autonomous driving, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 54 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-autonomous-driving/)
- Vision-language-action models / [VLA for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/vla/vla-for-autonomous-driving/)
- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Generative simulation for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/generative-simulation-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09747/) (2025)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11810/) (2021)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (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)
- [Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06978/) (2024)
- [ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08052/) (2025)
- [ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19755/) (2025)
- [OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23463/) (2025)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08481/) (2024)
- [FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17685/) (2025)
- [End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01941/) (2025)
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 134)

- [DriveLaW:Unifying Planning and Video Generation in a Latent Driving World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23421/) (2025)
- [World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00080/) (2026)
- [DSpark: Confidence-Scheduled Speculative Decoding with Semi-Autoregressive Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05147/) (2026)
- [Driving on Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05083/) (2026)
- [DriveWorld-VLA: Unified Latent-Space World Modeling with Vision-Language-Action for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06521/) (2026)
- [SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23369/) (2025)
- [MIND: Benchmarking Memory Consistency and Action Control in World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08025/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16760/) (2025)
- [Latent-WAM: Latent World Action Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24581/) (2026)
- [LaST-VLA: Thinking in Latent Spatio-Temporal Space for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01928/) (2026)
- [GigaBrain-0.5M*: a VLA That Learns From World Model-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12099/) (2026)
- [DriveVA: Video Action Models are Zero-Shot Drivers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04198/) (2026)
- [UniDrive-WM: Unified Understanding, Planning and Generation World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04453/) (2026)
- [DriveFine: Refining-Augmented Masked Diffusion VLA for Precise and Robust Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14577/) (2026)
- [Unleashing VLA Potentials in Autonomous Driving via Explicit Learning from Failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01063/) (2026)
- [UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02190/) (2026)
- [DriveDreamer-Policy: A Geometry-Grounded World-Action Model for Unified Generation and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01765/) (2026)
- [SpanVLA: Efficient Action Bridging and Learning from Negative-Recovery Samples for Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19710/) (2026)
- [DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09701/) (2026)
- [DrivePI: Spatial-aware 4D MLLM for Unified Autonomous Driving Understanding, Perception, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12799/) (2025)
- [Devil is in Narrow Policy: Unleashing Exploration in Driving VLA Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06049/) (2026)
- [DreamerAD: Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Latent World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24587/) (2026)
- [EponaV2: Driving World Model with Comprehensive Future Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14696/) (2026)
- [DriveWAM: Video Generative Priors Enable Scalable World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28544/) (2026)
- [Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16175/) (2025)
- [Robotic Video World Models: A Survey of Applications, Research Challenges, Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07823/) (2026)
- [Bridging Scene Generation and Planning: Driving with World Model via Unifying Vision and Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14948/) (2026)
- [DVGT-2: Vision-Geometry-Action Model for Autonomous Driving at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00813/) (2026)
- [ExploreVLA: Dense World Modeling and Exploration for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02714/) (2026)
- [CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10426/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scaling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on large-scale data offers a promising path to achieving a more generalized driving intelligence. However, VLA models are limited by a ``supervision deficit'': the vast model capacity is supervised by sparse, low-dimensional actions, leaving much of their representational power underutilized. To remedy this, we propose DriveVLA-W0, a training paradigm that employs world modeling to predict future images. This task generates a dense, self-supervised signal that compels the model to learn the underlying dynamics of the driving environment. We showcase the paradigm's versatility by instantiating it for two dominant VLA archetypes: an autoregressive world model for VLAs that use discrete visual tokens, and a diffusion world model for those operating on continuous visual features. Building on the rich representations learned from world modeling, we introduce a lightweight action expert to address the inference latency for real-time deployment. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM v1/v2 benchmark and a 680x larger in-house dataset demonstrate that DriveVLA-W0 significantly outperforms BEV and VLA baselines. Crucially, it amplifies the data scaling law, showing that performance gains accelerate as the training dataset size increases.