ST-Prune is a training-free spatio-temporal token pruning framework for VLMs in autonomous driving that achieves near-lossless results at 90% token reduction by exploiting motion volatility, temporal recency, and multi-view geometry.
Spacedrive: Infusing spatial awareness into vlm-based autonomous driving.arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.10719, 2
4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
4
Pith papers citing it
abstract
End-to-end autonomous driving methods built on vision language models (VLMs) have undergone rapid development driven by their universal visual understanding and strong reasoning capabilities obtained from the large-scale pretraining. However, we find that current VLMs struggle to understand fine-grained 3D spatial relationships which is a fundamental requirement for systems interacting with the physical world. To address this issue, we propose SpaceDrive, a spatial-aware VLM-based driving framework that treats spatial information as explicit positional encodings (PEs) instead of textual digit tokens, enabling joint reasoning over semantic and spatial representations. SpaceDrive employs a universal positional encoder to all 3D coordinates derived from multi-view depth estimation, historical ego-states, and text prompts. These 3D PEs are first superimposed to augment the corresponding 2D visual tokens. Meanwhile, they serve as a task-agnostic coordinate representation, replacing the digit-wise numerical tokens as both inputs and outputs for the VLM. This mechanism enables the model to better index specific visual semantics in spatial reasoning and directly regress trajectory coordinates rather than generating digit-by-digit, thereby enhancing planning accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that SpaceDrive achieves state-of-the-art open-loop performance on the nuScenes dataset and the second-best Driving Score of 78.02 on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark over existing VLM-based methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhenghao2519/SpaceDrive.
citation-role summary
background 2
citation-polarity summary
fields
cs.CV 4years
2026 4verdicts
UNVERDICTED 4roles
background 2polarities
background 2representative citing papers
CoPhy is a new RL framework that distills VLM cognition into BEV encoders, adds an auto-regressive BEV world model for action-conditioned future prediction, and optimizes policies via GRPO with dual physical-cognitive rewards, claiming SOTA on NAVSIM v1/v2.
EponaV2 advances perception-free driving world models by forecasting comprehensive future 3D geometry and semantic representations, achieving SOTA planning performance on NAVSIM benchmarks.
XEmbodied is a foundation model that integrates 3D geometric and physical signals into VLMs using a 3D Adapter and Efficient Image-Embodied Adapter, plus progressive curriculum and RL post-training, to improve spatial reasoning and embodied performance on 18 benchmarks.
citing papers explorer
-
ST-Prune: Training-Free Spatio-Temporal Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving
ST-Prune is a training-free spatio-temporal token pruning framework for VLMs in autonomous driving that achieves near-lossless results at 90% token reduction by exploiting motion volatility, temporal recency, and multi-view geometry.
-
Distill to Think, Foresee to Act: Cognitive-Physical Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
CoPhy is a new RL framework that distills VLM cognition into BEV encoders, adds an auto-regressive BEV world model for action-conditioned future prediction, and optimizes policies via GRPO with dual physical-cognitive rewards, claiming SOTA on NAVSIM v1/v2.
-
EponaV2: Driving World Model with Comprehensive Future Reasoning
EponaV2 advances perception-free driving world models by forecasting comprehensive future 3D geometry and semantic representations, achieving SOTA planning performance on NAVSIM benchmarks.
-
XEmbodied: A Foundation Model with Enhanced Geometric and Physical Cues for Large-Scale Embodied Environments
XEmbodied is a foundation model that integrates 3D geometric and physical signals into VLMs using a 3D Adapter and Efficient Image-Embodied Adapter, plus progressive curriculum and RL post-training, to improve spatial reasoning and embodied performance on 18 benchmarks.