dVLM-AD: Enhance Diffusion Vision-Language-Model for Driving via Controllable Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04459v1
• Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:05:41 GMT
• Title: dVLM-AD: Enhance Diffusion Vision-Language-Model for Driving via Controllable Reasoning
• Authors: Yingzi Ma, Yulong Cao, Wenhao Ding, Shuibai Zhang, Yan Wang, Boris Ivanovic, Ming Jiang, Marco Pavone, Chaowei Xiao,
• Abstract summary: We introduce dVLM-AD, a diffusion-based vision-language model that unifies perception, structured reasoning, and low-level planning for end-to-end driving.<n> evaluated on nuScenes and WOD-E2E, dVLM-AD yields more consistent reasoning-action pairs and achieves planning performance comparable to existing driving VLM/VLA systems.
• Score: 69.36145467833498
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The autonomous driving community is increasingly focused on addressing the challenges posed by out-of-distribution (OOD) driving scenarios. A dominant research trend seeks to enhance end-to-end (E2E) driving systems by integrating vision-language models (VLMs), leveraging their rich world knowledge and reasoning abilities to improve generalization across diverse environments. However, most existing VLMs or vision-language agents (VLAs) are built upon autoregressive (AR) models. In this paper, we observe that existing AR-based VLMs -- limited by causal attention and sequential token generation -- often fail to maintain consistency and controllability between high-level reasoning and low-level planning. In contrast, recent discrete diffusion VLMs equipped with bidirectional attention exhibit superior controllability and reliability through iterative denoising. Building on these observations, we introduce dVLM-AD, a diffusion-based vision-language model that unifies perception, structured reasoning, and low-level planning for end-to-end driving. Evaluated on nuScenes and WOD-E2E, dVLM-AD yields more consistent reasoning-action pairs and achieves planning performance comparable to existing driving VLM/VLA systems despite a modest backbone, outperforming AR-based baselines with a 9 percent improvement in behavior-trajectory consistency and a 6 percent increase in RFS on long-tail WOD-E2E scenarios. These results suggest a controllable and reliable pathway for scalable end-to-end driving.

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