TPS-Drive uses an agent-centric tokenizer supervised by a frozen 3D detection head to purify VLM spatial representations, enabling better scene forecasting and lower collision rates on nuScenes and NAVSIM benchmarks.
SpaceDrive: Infusing Spatial Awareness into VLM-based Autonomous Driving
9 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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
citation-polarity summary
years
2026 9roles
background 2polarities
background 2representative citing papers
OmniSpace is a plug-and-play method that improves spatial reasoning in MLLMs for AV by injecting camera pose, using epipolar attention across views, and distilling 3D geometric knowledge to overcome weak cross-view correspondence and depth estimation.
DriveJudge combines VLM reasoning with rule functions on a new 33,577-sample human-annotated dataset, outperforming EPDMS by 21.23 AUC on quality classification and DriveCritic by 6.5% on trajectory preference.
nuReasoning is a new real-world dataset and benchmark extending nuScenes/nuPlan with 20k clips and multi-type reasoning annotations to evaluate and improve reasoning in long-tail 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.
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 achieves SOTA on 18 embodied VQA benchmarks by fusing 3D geometric tokens and distilled physical cues into a 30B VLM with progressive curriculum training.
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
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TPS-Drive: Task-Guided Representation Purification for VLM-based Autonomous Driving
TPS-Drive uses an agent-centric tokenizer supervised by a frozen 3D detection head to purify VLM spatial representations, enabling better scene forecasting and lower collision rates on nuScenes and NAVSIM benchmarks.
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OmniSpace: Efficient Geometry Awareness for Autonomous Vehicles MLLMs
OmniSpace is a plug-and-play method that improves spatial reasoning in MLLMs for AV by injecting camera pose, using epipolar attention across views, and distilling 3D geometric knowledge to overcome weak cross-view correspondence and depth estimation.
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DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models
DriveJudge combines VLM reasoning with rule functions on a new 33,577-sample human-annotated dataset, outperforming EPDMS by 21.23 AUC on quality classification and DriveCritic by 6.5% on trajectory preference.
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nuReasoning: A Reasoning-Centric Dataset and Benchmark for Long-Tail Autonomous Driving
nuReasoning is a new real-world dataset and benchmark extending nuScenes/nuPlan with 20k clips and multi-type reasoning annotations to evaluate and improve reasoning in long-tail autonomous driving.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Steadily moving semi-infinite fracture in plane poroelasticity
XEmbodied achieves SOTA on 18 embodied VQA benchmarks by fusing 3D geometric tokens and distilled physical cues into a 30B VLM with progressive curriculum training.
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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.