Aligning Multi-Trajectory Supervision with Policy Optimization for VLA Driving
On the map: LLM reasoning → Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving
also in 3 more
Abstract (arXiv)
Vision-language-action (VLA) driving methods increasingly combine multi-trajectory imitation learning with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), making trajectory selection critical to final performance. However, some high-scoring trajectories that improve imitation can degrade subsequent GRPO by inducing advantage estimates misaligned with the current policy's feasible behavior distribution, driving updates away from safe and compliant behaviors. To address this, we propose a novel framework that aligns multi-trajectory supervision with policy optimization. To address the policy gradient bias induced by infeasible noisy trajectories outside the feasible region, augmented trajectories are constrained to a neighboring manifold of the ground-truth feasible region, and a Pareto-optimality criterion is adopted in place of the conventional aggregate score, retaining only non-dominated candidates and thereby filtering out conflicting samples at the source. To ensure that expanded trajectory supervision is effectively absorbed during policy optimization, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: feasibility-first advantage assignment and dynamic distillation. The former adapts Pareto credit to the feasibility composition of each rollout group and guides fully infeasible groups toward safe references. The latter updates teacher trajectories across refinement rounds to continually transfer useful supervision. Together, they progressively translate the benefits of expanded supervision into policy improvement. On NAVSIM v1 and v2, our method achieves 91.4 PDMS and 89.1 EPDMS, respectively, under single-trajectory inference, and recovers 440 of 658 initially failed scenes, 11.1% higher than the original GRPO baseline.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 21 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.
Builds on
21 of 26 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2025AdaThinkDrive: Adaptive Thinking via Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving17 Sep
- 2025AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning16 Jun
- 2025Plan-R1: Safe and Feasible Trajectory Planning as Language Modeling23 May
- 2025OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning6 Apr
- 2025AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning10 Mar
Other references · 16
- 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,769
- 2019Stabilizing Off-Policy Q-Learning via Bootstrapping Error Reductioncited by 833
- 2020AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasetscited by 647
- 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 477
- 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 244
- 2024EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 226
- 2025OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Modelcited by 172
- 2025FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Drivingcited by 165
- 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Modelcited by 161
- 2025DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Drivingcited by 127
- 2025Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillationcited by 93
- 2025From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Predictioncited by 29
4 more
- 2026Drive-JEPA: Video JEPA Meets Multimodal Trajectory Distillation for End-to-End Drivingcited by 26
- 2026Devil is in Narrow Policy: Unleashing Exploration in Driving VLA Modelscited by 14
- 2026HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Drivingcited by 4
- 2025HMAD: Advancing E2E Driving with Anchored Offset Proposals and Simulation-Supervised Multi-target Scoringcited by 1
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- 2025TGRPO :Fine-tuning Vision-Language-Action Model via Trajectory-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization
- 2026PAPO-VLA: Planning-Aware Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models
- 2026DriveMA: Driving Vision-Language-Action Models with verifiable Meta-Actions
- 2026FIRE-VLA: Failure-Informed Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving
- 2025VDRive: Leveraging Reinforced VLA and Diffusion Policy for End-to-end Autonomous Driving
- 2026Judge, Then Drive: A Critic-Centric Vision Language Action Framework for Autonomous Driving
- 2025IRL-VLA: Training an Vision-Language-Action Policy via Reward World Model
- 2026DriftOPD: Sequence-Level Reverse-KL Distillation for One-Step VLA Policies