mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MTDrive: Multi-turn Interactive Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2601.22930 ↗First posted 30 Jan 2026cs.RO cs.AI cs.LGcited by 1

On the map: End-to-end autonomous driving → Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies

Abstract (arXiv)

Trajectory planning is a core task in autonomous driving, requiring the prediction of safe and comfortable paths across diverse scenarios. Integrating Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing "long-tail" scenarios. However, existing methods are constrained to single-turn reasoning, limiting their ability to handle complex tasks requiring iterative refinement. To overcome this limitation, we present MTDrive, a multi-turn framework that enables MLLMs to iteratively refine trajectories based on environmental feedback. MTDrive introduces Multi-Turn Group Relative Policy Optimization (mtGRPO), which mitigates reward sparsity by computing relative advantages across turns. We further construct an interactive trajectory understanding dataset from closed-loop simulation to support multi-turn training. Experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate superior performance compared to existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our multi-turn reasoning paradigm. Additionally, we implement system-level optimizations to reduce data transfer overhead caused by high-resolution images and multi-turn sequences, achieving 2.5x training throughput. Our data, models, and code will be made available soon.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving. Builds on 31 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.

Builds on

31 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail30 Oct
  2. 2025Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving24 Sep
  3. 2025ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving9 Jun
  4. 2025OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning6 Apr
  5. 2025AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning10 Mar
  6. 2024EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving30 Oct
  7. 2024Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Driving29 Oct

Other references · 24

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  3. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  4. 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,431
  5. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
  6. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,068
  7. 2024DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 482
  8. 2023DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Modelcited by 455
  9. 2021Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 372
  10. 2022ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learningcited by 365
  11. 2025RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 357
  12. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 343
12 more
  1. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 324
  2. 2023LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Modelscited by 301
  3. 2023ReMax: A Simple, Effective, and Efficient Reinforcement Learning Method for Aligning Large Language Modelscited by 184
  4. 2023Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Researchcited by 158
  5. 2023LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Drivingcited by 144
  6. 2025GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 117
  7. 2025RAD: Training an End-to-End Driving Policy via Large-Scale 3DGS-based Reinforcement Learningcited by 76
  8. 2024NeMo-Aligner: Scalable Toolkit for Efficient Model Alignmentcited by 40
  9. 2025Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Trainingcited by 39
  10. 2025CarPlanner: Consistent Auto-regressive Trajectory Planning for Large-scale Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Drivingcited by 31
  11. 2025Sce2DriveX: A Generalized MLLM Framework for Scene-to-Drive Learningcited by 25
  12. 2025ReasonPlan: Unified Scene Prediction and Decision Reasoning for Closed-loop Autonomous Drivingcited by 22

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026CritiqueDriveVLM: From Verifier-Guided Reinforcement Learning to Latent Thought Distillation for Autonomous Driving
  2. 2026FactorDrive: Adaptive Multi-Step Reasoning Driven by Planning-Critical Factors for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  3. 2026Fine-tuning is Not Enough: A Parallel Framework for Collaborative Imitation and Reinforcement Learning in End-to-end Autonomous Driving
  4. 2026MAGNIFIED: RL Fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models for Motion Planning
  5. 2025DriveMind: A Dual Visual Language Model-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2025MindDrive: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Autonomous Driving via Online Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2021MetaDrive: Composing Diverse Driving Scenarios for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2022Driver Dojo: A Benchmark for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving