# VLA for autonomous driving

Area: [Vision-language-action models](https://mlsanity.com/vla/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/vla/vla-for-autonomous-driving/

## Key facts

- VLA for autonomous driving: 101 papers on arXiv since 2025 (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- 58 of its 101 mapped papers (57%) cite “AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning” (2025, arXiv 2506.13757).
- 43 of its 101 mapped papers (43%) cite “OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model” (2025, arXiv 2503.23463).
- 7 new papers 17 Sep–7 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [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), cited by 58 papers here
- [OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23463/) (2025), cited by 43 papers here
- [DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12796/) (2025), cited by 33 papers here
- [Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00088/) (2025), cited by 25 papers here
- [DriveMoE: Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language-Action Model in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16278/) (2025), cited by 22 papers here
- [FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17685/) (2025), cited by 20 papers here
- [Impromptu VLA: Open Weights and Open Data for Driving Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23757/) (2025), cited by 17 papers here
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24044/) (2025), cited by 11 papers here
- [AutoDrive-R2: Incentivizing Reasoning and Self-Reflection Capacity for VLA Model in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01944/) (2025), cited by 8 papers here
- [Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20109/) (2025), cited by 7 papers here

## New (17 Sep–7 Oct)

- [Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10390/) (2026-10-07)
- [Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38641/) (2026-09-29)
- [CAR-VLA: Complexity-Aware and Risk-Adaptive Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34387/) (2026-09-29)
- [RefineDrive: Reliable Failure-Guided Learning for Vision-Language-Action Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35078/) (2026-09-28)
- [CausalDriveBench: Evaluating Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32157/) (2026-09-26)
- [Less Language, More Latents: Annotation-Efficient VLAs for Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27747/) (2026-09-23)
- [PRIME: Perception Feedback with Situational Memory Embeddings in VLA Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22040/) (2026-09-18)