DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12796v1
• Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2025 17:59:47 GMT
• Title: DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving
• Abstract summary: We propose textbfDriveVLA-W0, a training paradigm that employs world modeling to predict future images.<n>This task generates a dense, self-supervised signal that compels the model to learn the underlying dynamics of the driving environment.<n>Experiments on the NAVSIM v1/v2 benchmark and a 680x larger in-house dataset demonstrate that DriveVLA-W0 significantly outperforms BEV and VLA baselines.
• Score: 52.63591791507895
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Scaling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on large-scale data offers a promising path to achieving a more generalized driving intelligence. However, VLA models are limited by a ``supervision deficit'': the vast model capacity is supervised by sparse, low-dimensional actions, leaving much of their representational power underutilized. To remedy this, we propose \textbf{DriveVLA-W0}, a training paradigm that employs world modeling to predict future images. This task generates a dense, self-supervised signal that compels the model to learn the underlying dynamics of the driving environment. We showcase the paradigm's versatility by instantiating it for two dominant VLA archetypes: an autoregressive world model for VLAs that use discrete visual tokens, and a diffusion world model for those operating on continuous visual features. Building on the rich representations learned from world modeling, we introduce a lightweight action expert to address the inference latency for real-time deployment. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM v1/v2 benchmark and a 680x larger in-house dataset demonstrate that DriveVLA-W0 significantly outperforms BEV and VLA baselines. Crucially, it amplifies the data scaling law, showing that performance gains accelerate as the training dataset size increases.

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