Aligning Multi-Trajectory Supervision with Policy Optimization for VLA Driving
cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-08-31
Updated: 2026-08-31
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Vision-language-action (VLA) driving methods increasingly combine multi-trajectory imitation learning with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), making trajectory selection critical to final
Terminology
Abstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) driving methods increasingly combine multi-trajectory imitation learning with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), making trajectory selection critical to final performance. However, some high-scoring trajectories that improve imitation can degrade subsequent GRPO by inducing advantage estimates misaligned with the current policy's feasible behavior distribution, driving updates away from safe and compliant behaviors. To address this, we propose a novel framework that aligns multi-trajectory supervision with policy optimization. To address the policy gradient bias induced by infeasible noisy trajectories outside the feasible region, augmented trajectories are constrained to a neighboring manifold of the ground-truth feasible region, and a Pareto-optimality criterion is adopted in place of the conventional aggregate score, retaining only non-dominated candidates and thereby filtering out conflicting samples at the source. To ensure that expanded trajectory supervision is effectively absorbed during policy optimization, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: feasibility-first advantage assignment and dynamic distillation. The former adapts Pareto credit to the feasibility composition of each rollout group and guides fully infeasible groups toward safe references. The latter updates teacher trajectories across refinement rounds to continually transfer useful supervision. Together, they progressively translate the benefits of expanded supervision into policy improvement. On NAVSIM v1 and v2, our method achieves 91.4 PDMS and 89.1 EPDMS, respectively, under single-trajectory inference, and recovers 440 of 658 initially failed scenes, 11.1% higher than the original GRPO baseline.
Sources
- CLOVER: Closed-Loop Value Estimation and Ranking for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Planning
- Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving
- Devil is in Narrow Policy: Unleashing Exploration in Driving VLA Models
- EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving
- AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning
- EvaDrive: Evolutionary Adversarial Policy Optimization for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillation
- DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving
- ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillation
- AdaThinkDrive: Adaptive Thinking via Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
- AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasets
- Plan-R1: Safe and Feasible Trajectory Planning as Language Modeling
- HMAD: Advancing E2E Driving with Anchored Offset Proposals and Simulation-Supervised Multi-target Scoring
- Drive-JEPA: Video JEPA Meets Multimodal Trajectory Distillation for End-to-End Driving
- HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Driving
- OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model
- InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models
- DiffusionDriveV2: Reinforcement Learning-Constrained Truncated Diffusion Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Driving
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