# PRIME: Perception Feedback with Situational Memory Embeddings in VLA Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22040/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLA for autonomous driving, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 16 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13757/) (2025)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24044/) (2025)
- [Standing Between Past and Future: Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Multi-Camera 3D Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03802/) (2023)
- [SpaceDrive: Infusing Spatial Awareness into VLM-based Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10719/) (2025)
- [Generative Scenario Rollouts for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11475/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving operate primarily through feedforward inference across the perception--reasoning--planning hierarchy. While modern architectures maintain temporal recurrence within the perceptual module, early perception remains blind to downstream reasoning and navigation goals, processing visual inputs agnostically without prioritizing cues informed by prior decisions. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces PRIME, a learned feedback mechanism that conditions the VLA perceptual queries on a novel Situational Memory. By aggregating latent representations of past perception, reasoning, navigation goals, and predicted behaviors across an L-step window via cross-attention, PRIME enables intent-driven perceptual attention at minimal computational cost, adding only a maximum of 29.7M parameters (0.41% of the 7.3B-parameter base model). Evaluated on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark, PRIME achieves a state-of-the-art Driving Score of 82.47 (+4.73 over ORION) and a Success Rate of 60.00% (+5.38 percentage points), the highest reported Driving Score among published VLAs trained on Think2Drive demonstrations.