# FIRE-VLA: Failure-Informed Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13395 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13395/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLA for autonomous driving, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 10 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [VLA for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/vla/vla-for-autonomous-driving/)
- 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, 10 of 10)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18734/) (2026)
- [ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19755/) (2025)
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025)
- [VLP: Vision Language Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05577/) (2024)
- [CoVLA: Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10845/) (2024)
- [Unleashing VLA Potentials in Autonomous Driving via Explicit Learning from Failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01063/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RefineDrive: Reliable Failure-Guided Learning for Vision-Language-Action Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35078/) (2026)
- [FPD-Drive: Future Policy Distillation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13232/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning improves autonomous-driving vision-language-action (VLA) models by evaluating trajectories sampled from the current policy. Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within each rollout group. When all sampled trajectories are poor, this relative signal can rank failures without identifying behavior outside the failed region. We introduce FIRE-VLA, a failure-informed self-evolution framework that converts such unresolved failures into privileged supervision for the next policy. Low-reward, low-diversity groups trigger self-distillation from a frozen round-start copy of the same model. Teacher and student have the same parameter scale, but only the teacher observes the hidden future trajectory. Supervision follows the student's generated prefix and is restricted to answer tokens, while GRPO remains active for every group. The updated policy supplies the teacher for the next round, allowing the routed failure distribution to change with the policy without requiring a larger external teacher. Starting from the same Qwen2.5-VL-3B SFT checkpoint, the comparison matches student rollout and policy-update counts. On 6,019 examples from 150 held-out nuScenes scenes, FIRE-VLA retains comparable single-sample planning, reduces G=4 mean L2 from 1.848 to 1.500 m, and lowers evaluation-persistent failure prevalence from 13.03% to 11.20%. The reduction in mean error arises mainly from rare severe rollouts rather than uniform improvement across ordinary trajectories.