ViLaD: A Large Vision Language Diffusion Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cui, Can, Zhou, Yupeng, Peng, Juntong, Park, Sung-Yeon, Yang, Zichong, Sankaranarayanan, Prashanth, Zhang, Jiaru, Zhang, Ruqi, Wang, Ziran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cui, Can
Zhou, Yupeng
Peng, Juntong
Park, Sung-Yeon
Yang, Zichong
Sankaranarayanan, Prashanth
Zhang, Jiaru
Zhang, Ruqi
Wang, Ziran
author_facet Cui, Can
Zhou, Yupeng
Peng, Juntong
Park, Sung-Yeon
Yang, Zichong
Sankaranarayanan, Prashanth
Zhang, Jiaru
Zhang, Ruqi
Wang, Ziran
contents End-to-end autonomous driving systems built on Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown significant promise, yet their reliance on autoregressive architectures introduces some limitations for real-world applications. The sequential, token-by-token generation process of these models results in high inference latency and cannot perform bidirectional reasoning, making them unsuitable for dynamic, safety-critical environments. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ViLaD, a novel Large Vision Language Diffusion (LVLD) framework for end-to-end autonomous driving that represents a paradigm shift. ViLaD leverages a masked diffusion model that enables parallel generation of entire driving decision sequences, significantly reducing computational latency. Moreover, its architecture supports bidirectional reasoning, allowing the model to consider both past and future simultaneously, and supports progressive easy-first generation to iteratively improve decision quality. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset, where ViLaD outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive VLM baselines in both planning accuracy and inference speed, while achieving a near-zero failure rate. Furthermore, we demonstrate the framework's practical viability through a real-world deployment on an autonomous vehicle for an interactive parking task, confirming its effectiveness and soundness for practical applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViLaD: A Large Vision Language Diffusion Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Cui, Can
Zhou, Yupeng
Peng, Juntong
Park, Sung-Yeon
Yang, Zichong
Sankaranarayanan, Prashanth
Zhang, Jiaru
Zhang, Ruqi
Wang, Ziran
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
End-to-end autonomous driving systems built on Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown significant promise, yet their reliance on autoregressive architectures introduces some limitations for real-world applications. The sequential, token-by-token generation process of these models results in high inference latency and cannot perform bidirectional reasoning, making them unsuitable for dynamic, safety-critical environments. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ViLaD, a novel Large Vision Language Diffusion (LVLD) framework for end-to-end autonomous driving that represents a paradigm shift. ViLaD leverages a masked diffusion model that enables parallel generation of entire driving decision sequences, significantly reducing computational latency. Moreover, its architecture supports bidirectional reasoning, allowing the model to consider both past and future simultaneously, and supports progressive easy-first generation to iteratively improve decision quality. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset, where ViLaD outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive VLM baselines in both planning accuracy and inference speed, while achieving a near-zero failure rate. Furthermore, we demonstrate the framework's practical viability through a real-world deployment on an autonomous vehicle for an interactive parking task, confirming its effectiveness and soundness for practical applications.
title ViLaD: A Large Vision Language Diffusion Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12603