mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MindDrive: An All-in-One Framework Bridging World Models and Vision-Language Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2512.04441 ↗First posted 4 Dec 2025cs.CVcited by 12

On the map: World models → World models for autonomous driving

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-End autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has emerged as a new paradigm, where trajectory planning plays a crucial role. Existing studies mainly follow two directions: trajectory generation oriented, which focuses on producing high-quality trajectories with simple decision mechanisms, and trajectory selection oriented, which performs multi-dimensional evaluation to select the best trajectory yet lacks sufficient generative capability. In this work, we propose MindDrive, a harmonized framework that integrates high-quality trajectory generation with comprehensive decision reasoning. It establishes a structured reasoning paradigm of "context simulation - candidate generation - multi-objective trade-off". In particular, the proposed Future-aware Trajectory Generator (FaTG), based on a World Action Model (WaM), performs ego-conditioned "what-if" simulations to predict potential future scenes and generate foresighted trajectory candidates. Building upon this, the VLM-oriented Evaluator (VLoE) leverages the reasoning capability of a large vision-language model to conduct multi-objective evaluations across safety, comfort, and efficiency dimensions, leading to reasoned and human-aligned decision making. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM-v1 and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks demonstrate that MindDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance across multi-dimensional driving metrics, significantly enhancing safety, compliance, and generalization. This work provides a promising path toward interpretable and cognitively guided autonomous driving.

Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for autonomous driving, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 37 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2025.

Builds on

37 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model1 Jul
  2. 2025Raw2Drive: Reinforcement Learning with Aligned World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (in CARLA v2)22 May
  3. 2025OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning6 Apr
  4. 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model2 Apr
  5. 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model12 Jun
  6. 2023OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Driving27 Nov
  7. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles22 Jun

Other references · 30

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,068
  3. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 477
  4. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 343
  5. 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 287
  6. 2025AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 252
  7. 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 244
  8. 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representationcited by 239
  9. 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generationcited by 177
  10. 2023Think Twice before Driving: Towards Scalable Decoders for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 168
  11. 2024TinyLLaVA: A Framework of Small-scale Large Multimodal Modelscited by 164
  12. 2025Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 141
18 more
  1. 2022Learning from All Vehiclescited by 135
  2. 2025GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 117
  3. 2024OpenEMMA: Open-Source Multimodal Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 93
  4. 2025Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillationcited by 93
  5. 2024DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mambacited by 87
  6. 2025Don't Shake the Wheel: Momentum-Aware Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 84
  7. 2025ARTEMIS: Autoregressive End-to-End Trajectory Planning with Mixture of Experts for Autonomous Drivingcited by 66
  8. 2025Generalized Trajectory Scoring for End-to-end Multimodal Planningcited by 63
  9. 2025Bridging Past and Future: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Historical Prediction and Planningcited by 48
  10. 2025Centaur: Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Test-Time Trainingcited by 41
  11. 2025AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 35
  12. 2023PPAD: Iterative Interactions of Prediction and Planning for End-to-end Autonomous Drivingcited by 33
  13. 2024GaussianAD: Gaussian-Centric End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 31
  14. 2025GuideFlow: Constraint-Guided Flow Matching for Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 21
  15. 2024FASIONAD : FAst and Slow FusION Thinking Systems for Human-Like Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Feedbackcited by 18
  16. 2025DIVER: Reinforced Diffusion Breaks Imitation Bottlenecks in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 17
  17. 2025Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving: Progress, Limitations, and Future Directionscited by 14
  18. 2025SimpleVSF: VLM-Scoring Fusion for Trajectory Prediction of End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 11.

12 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025MindDrive: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Autonomous Driving via Online Reinforcement Learning
  2. 2026WorldVLM: Combining World Model Forecasting and Vision-Language Reasoning
  3. 2025ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  4. 2026Learning Vision-Language-Action World Models for Autonomous Driving
  5. 2025ImagiDrive: A Unified Imagination-and-Planning Framework for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2025FutureX: Enhance End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Latent Chain-of-Thought World Model
  7. 2026MindDriver: Introducing Progressive Multimodal Reasoning for Autonomous Driving
  8. 2025From Human Intention to Action Prediction: Intention-Driven End-to-End Autonomous Driving