mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

StyleVLA: Driving Style-Aware Vision Language Action Model for Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2603.09482 ↗First posted 10 Mar 2026cs.ROcited by 5

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection

also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Language Models (VLMs) bridge visual perception and linguistic reasoning. In Autonomous Driving (AD), this synergy has enabled Vision Language Action (VLA) models, which translate high-level multimodal understanding into driving behaviors, typically represented as future trajectories. However, existing VLA models mainly generate generic collision-free trajectories. Beyond collision avoidance, adapting to diverse driving styles (e.g., sporty, comfortable) is essential for personalized driving. Moreover, many methods treat trajectory generation as naive token prediction, which can produce kinematically infeasible actions. To address these limitations, we present StyleVLA, a physics-informed VLA framework for generating diverse and physically plausible driving behaviors. We introduce a hybrid loss that combines a kinematic consistency constraint with a continuous regression head to improve trajectory feasibility. To train StyleVLA, built on Qwen3-VL-4B, we construct a large-scale instruction dataset with over 1.2k scenarios, 76k Bird's Eye View (BEV) samples, and 42k First Person View (FPV) samples, with ground-truth trajectories for five driving styles and natural-language instructions. Experiments show that our 4B-parameter StyleVLA significantly outperforms proprietary models (e.g., Gemini-3-Pro) and state-of-the-art VLA models. Using a composite driving score measuring success rate, physical feasibility, and style adherence, StyleVLA achieves 0.55 on BEV and 0.51 on FPV, versus 0.32 and 0.35 for Gemini-3-Pro. These results show that a specialized, physics-informed, lightweight model can surpass closed-source models on domain-specific tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 30 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

Builds on

30 of 33 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision19 Dec
  2. 2024DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models19 Feb
  3. 2023DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering21 Dec

Other references · 27

  1. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
  2. 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,485
  3. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  4. 2019Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Datasetcited by 2,436
  5. 2017Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semanticscited by 1,345
  6. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,068
  7. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 613
  8. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontierscited by 485
  9. 2023GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPTcited by 344
  10. 2018The highD Dataset: A Drone Dataset of Naturalistic Vehicle Trajectories on German Highways for Validation of Highly Automated Driving Systemscited by 276
  11. 2024EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 226
  12. 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generationcited by 177
15 more
  1. 2025OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Modelcited by 172
  2. 2025SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignmentcited by 149
  3. 2025Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tailcited by 136
  4. 2022DRAMA: Joint Risk Localization and Captioning in Drivingcited by 125
  5. 2024VLP: Vision Language Planning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 125
  6. 2024A Survey for Foundation Models in Autonomous Drivingcited by 51
  7. 2025Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysiscited by 37
  8. 2024DriveGPT: Scaling Autoregressive Behavior Models for Drivingcited by 29
  9. 2023MAVERIC: A Data-Driven Approach to Personalized Autonomous Drivingcited by 22
  10. 2025StyleDrive: Towards Driving-Style Aware Benchmarking of End-To-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 20
  11. 2017Minimum Covariance Determinant and Extensionscited by 18
  12. 2020The NVIDIA PilotNet Experimentscited by 15
  13. 2024FRENETIX: A High-Performance and Modular Motion Planning Framework for Autonomous Drivingcited by 14
  14. 2025Foundation Models for Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving: A Review of Progress and Open Challengescited by 3
  15. 2025From Shadows to Safety: Occlusion Tracking and Risk Mitigation for Urban Autonomous Drivingcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future
  2. 2026Judge, Then Drive: A Critic-Centric Vision Language Action Framework for Autonomous Driving
  3. 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving
  4. 2025Impromptu VLA: Open Weights and Open Data for Driving Vision-Language-Action Models
  5. 2026Unifying Language-Action Understanding and Generation for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2026Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models What to See and Where to Look
  7. 2025Reasoning-VLA: A Fast and General Vision-Language-Action Reasoning Model for Autonomous Driving
  8. 2025DriveAction: A Benchmark for Exploring Human-like Driving Decisions in VLA Models