Core Insights - The article discusses advancements in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving, highlighting a shift from traditional supervised learning methods to reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to enhance model generalization and reasoning capabilities [2]. Summary by Sections VLA + RL Research Overview - The article summarizes recent works in the VLA + RL domain, indicating a trend towards using RL to address limitations in previous models, particularly in terms of hallucination issues and the efficiency of continuous action space exploration [2]. Key Papers and Contributions - **MindDrive**: Introduces a framework that transforms action space into a discrete language decision space, achieving a driving score of 78.04 and a success rate of 55.09% on the Bench2Drive benchmark using a lightweight model [6]. - **WAM-Diff**: Proposes an end-to-end VLA framework that utilizes masked diffusion for trajectory optimization, achieving superior performance on the NAVSIM benchmark [7]. - **LCDrive**: Addresses temporal expression and latency issues in text chain reasoning by employing a latent chain-of-thought mechanism, demonstrating improved reasoning efficiency and trajectory quality [12]. - **Reasoning-VLA**: Develops a framework that enhances parallel trajectory generation through learnable action queries, achieving high performance across multiple datasets [13]. - **Alpamayo-R1**: Bridges reasoning and action prediction through a modular architecture and multi-stage training, improving generalization in long-tail scenarios [18]. - **AdaThinkDrive**: Introduces a dual-mode mechanism to balance decision accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving a PDMS score of 90.3 on the Navsim benchmark [20]. - **AutoDrive-R²**: Combines supervised fine-tuning and RL to enhance trajectory planning accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a significant reduction in error rates [25]. - **IRL-VLA**: Proposes a framework that avoids reliance on simulators by using a reward world model, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM v2 benchmark [31]. - **DriveAgent-R1**: Integrates active perception with hybrid thinking, achieving significant improvements in decision reliability and efficiency [32]. - **Drive-R1**: Connects reasoning and planning in VLMs, providing effective methods for integrating reasoning with motion planning [37]. - **ReCogDrive**: Merges cognitive reasoning with diffusion planners, achieving state-of-the-art performance while addressing the limitations of imitation learning [38].