{"paper":{"title":"From Representational Complementarity to Dual Systems: Synergizing VLM and Vision-Only Backbones for End-to-End Driving","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CV"],"primary_cat":"cs.RO","authors_text":"Bingchuan Sun, Canyu Chen, Cheng Chi, Chenxu Dang, Haiyan Liu, Jason Bao, Sining Ang, Xuanyao Mao, Xuliang, Yan Wang, Yuguang Yang","submitted_at":"2026-02-11T10:25:05Z","abstract_excerpt":"Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving augments end-to-end (E2E) planning with language-enabled visual backbones, yet it remains unclear how vision-language models (VLMs) differ from standard vision-only encoders and whether these differences survive policy learning. We study this question under a unified VLM-hidden + diffusion-policy paradigm, comparing multiple VLM families/scales (e.g., InternVL3 and Qwen3VL) with vision-only encoders (e.g., ResNet, ViT, and EVA-CLIP). We ask three questions: how similar are their representations, do residual differences induce meaningful behavioral differenc"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2602.10719","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2602.10719/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}