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EvoDriveVLA: Evolving Autonomous Driving Vision-Language-Action Model via Collaborative Perception-Planning Distillation

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • EvoDriveVLA is a new collaborative perception-planning distillation framework designed to improve autonomous driving Vision-Language-Action models by addressing perception degradation and instability in long-term planning.
  • The framework introduces self-anchored visual distillation to regularize student visual representations through trajectory-guided key-region awareness.
  • It also employs oracle-guided trajectory distillation using a future-aware oracle teacher with trajectory refinement and Monte Carlo dropout sampling to select optimal trajectories.
  • EvoDriveVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-loop evaluations and shows significant improvements in closed-loop evaluations for autonomous driving tasks.
  • The code for EvoDriveVLA is publicly available on GitHub, facilitating further research and practical applications in autonomous driving AI models.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09465 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:EvoDriveVLA: Evolving Autonomous Driving Vision-Language-Action Model via Collaborative Perception-Planning Distillation

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Abstract:Vision-Language-Action models have shown great promise for autonomous driving, yet they suffer from degraded perception after unfreezing the visual encoder and struggle with accumulated instability in long-term planning. To address these challenges, we propose EvoDriveVLA-a novel collaborative perception-planning distillation framework that integrates self-anchored perceptual constraints and oracle-guided trajectory optimization. Specifically, self-anchored visual distillation leverages self-anchor teacher to deliver visual anchoring constraints, regularizing student representations via trajectory-guided key-region awareness. In parallel, oracle-guided trajectory distillation employs a future-aware oracle teacher with coarse-to-fine trajectory refinement and Monte Carlo dropout sampling to produce high-quality trajectory candidates, thereby selecting the optimal trajectory to guide the student's prediction. EvoDriveVLA achieves SOTA performance in open-loop evaluation and significantly enhances performance in closed-loop evaluation. Our code is available at: this https URL.
Comments:
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09465 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09465v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09465
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Jiajun Cao [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:19:07 UTC (19,491 KB)
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