End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from the conventional paradigm based on sparse perception into vision-language-action (VLA) models, which focus on learning language descriptions as an auxiliary task to facilitate planning. In this paper, we propose an alternative Vision-Geometry-Action (VGA) paradigm that advocates dense 3D geometry as the critical cue for autonomous driving. As vehicles operate in a 3D world, we think dense 3D geometry provides the most comprehensive information for decision-making. However, most existing geometry reconstruction methods (e.g., DVGT) rely on computationally expensive batch processing of multi-frame inputs and cannot be applied to online planning. To address this, we introduce a streaming Driving Visual Geometry Transformer (DVGT-2), which processes inputs in an online manner and jointly outputs dense geometry and trajectory planning for the current frame. We employ temporal causal attention and cache historical features to support on-the-fly inference. To further enhance efficiency, we propose a sliding-window streaming strategy and use historical caches within a certain interval to avoid repetitive computations. Despite the faster speed, DVGT-2 achieves superior geometry reconstruction performance on various datasets. The same trained DVGT-2 can be directly applied to planning across diverse camera configurations without fine-tuning, including closed-loop NAVSIM and open-loop nuScenes benchmarks.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: DVGT-2 is a streaming visual geometry transformer specifically designed for autonomous driving . It inputs multi-view images and jointly predicts the 3D pointmaps, the ego poses, and future trajectory planning in an online manner.
Figure 2: Comparison of different paradigms for end-to-end autonomous driving . Conventional end-to-end models rely on sparse perception representations for scene understanding. VLA models predict language descriptions to interpret driving scenarios. Our VGA model reconstructs dense 3D geometry to facilitate safe planning.
Figure 3: Comparison of different paradigms for geometry reconstruction . Batch-processing models like DVGT [ 93 ] compute pair-wise relations across all frames, incurring an overall O(T2) complexity. Full-history streaming models like StreamVGGT [ 92 ] extract temporal cues from the entire history, leading to an O(T) per-frame complexity. In contrast, our sliding-window streaming strategy attends to a fixed-size cache of length W , achieving a constant O(W) per-frame complexity.
Figure 4: Overall archetecture of DVGT-2 . Our model consists of an image encoder, a geometry transformer with temporal causal attention, and a set of prediction heads to jointly output geometry reconstruction and trajectory planning.
Figure 5: Efficient inference of DVGT-2 . Given the current frame multi-view input and the cache of past W frames, our model performs efficient geometry reconstruction and trajectory planning in an online manner, avoiding recomputing historical frames.
Method
Paradigm
Acc ↓
Comp ↓
Abs Rel ↓
δ < 1.25↑
AUC ↑
Time
VGGT* [ 66 ]
Full-Seq.
1.705
1.711
0.280
0.669
74.4
∼ 5.31s
MapAnything [ 29 ]
Full-Seq.
3.269
4.214
0.476
0.253
69.5
∼ 2.28s
DVGT [ 93 ]
Full-Seq.
0.412
0.491
0.048
0.971
76.6
∼ 1.88s
CUT3R* [ 67 ]
Streaming
1.858
2.245
0.275
0.596
36.9
∼ 0.35 s
StreamVGGT* [ 92 ]
Streaming
2.209
2.060
0.303
0.620
74.1
∼ 1.94s
Driv3R* [ 7 ]
Streaming
0.884
1.693
0.188
0.740
-
∼ 0.56s
Table 1: Quantitative 3D geometry reconstruction results on OpenScene [ 5 ] . * denotes performing post-alignment with sparse LiDAR to recover the metric scale.
Method
Paradigm
Acc ↓
Comp ↓
Abs Rel ↓
δ < 1.25↑
AUC ↑
VGGT* [ 66 ]
Full-Seq.
1.944
2.071
0.348
0.573
83.9
MapAnything [ 29 ]
Full-Seq.
4.447
4.860
0.562
0.271
84.9
DVGT [ 93 ]
Full-Seq.
0.469
0.508
0.067
0.955
86.4
CUT3R* [ 67 ]
Streaming
2.055
2.611
0.330
0.547
44.5
StreamVGGT* [ 92 ]
Streaming
2.414
2.284
0.375
0.563
86.0
Driv3R* [ 7 ]
Streaming
0.742
1.345
0.189
0.721
–
Table 2: Quantitative 3D geometry reconstruction results on nuScenes [ 1 ] .
Method
Paradigm
Acc ↓
Comp ↓
Abs Rel ↓
δ < 1.25↑
AUC ↑
VGGT* [ 66 ]
Full-Seq.
3.202
3.390
0.333
0.567
84.3
MapAnything [ 29 ]
Full-Seq.
9.903
8.365
0.492
0.217
82.3
DVGT [ 93 ]
Full-Seq.
1.752
2.263
0.102
0.922
86.0
CUT3R* [ 67 ]
Streaming
3.369
4.192
0.290
0.563
50.9
StreamVGGT* [ 92 ]
Streaming
3.207
2.960
0.302
0.604
85.6
Driv3R* [ 7 ]
Streaming
0.800
1.311
0.168
0.770
–
Table 3: Quantitative 3D geometry reconstruction results on Waymo [ 62 ] .
Method
Paradigm
Acc ↓
Comp ↓
Abs Rel ↓
δ < 1.25↑
AUC ↑
VGGT* [ 66 ]
Full-Seq.
2.322
2.879
0.798
0.395
86.3
MapAnything [ 29 ]
Full-Seq.
7.442
7.928
1.836
0.207
87.4
DVGT [ 93 ]
Full-Seq.
0.751
1.017
0.145
0.848
95.3
CUT3R* [ 67 ]
Streaming
2.827
4.724
0.875
0.317
48.6
StreamVGGT* [ 92 ]
Streaming
2.655
2.731
0.810
0.419
91.9
Driv3R* [ 7 ]
Streaming
0.950
1.259
0.185
0.740
–
Table 4: Quantitative 3D geometry reconstruction results on DDAD [ 11 ] .
Method
Input
Aux. Sup.
NC ↑
DAC ↑
TTC ↑
Comf. ↑
EP ↑
PDMS ↑
PARA-Drive [ 74 ]
C
Map & Mot. & Occ
97.9
92.4
93.0
99.8
79.3
84.0
VADv2 [ 3 ]
C
Map & Mot. & Traffic
97.2
89.1
91.6
100
76.0
80.9
UniAD [ 16 ]
C
Map & Box & Mot. & Occ
97.8
91.9
92.9
100
78.8
83.4
Transfuser [ 4 ]
C & L
Map & Box
97.7
92.8
92.8
100
79.2
84.0
Hydra-MDP [ 38 ]
C & L
Map & Box
98.3
96.0
94.6
100
78.7
86.5
GoalFlow [ 76 ]
C & L
Map & Box
98.3
93.8
94.3
100
79.8
85.7
Table 5: Closed-loop planning results on NAVSIM v1 navtest split . † denotes using reinforcement learning to boost planning scores. Future states represent world-modeling-based methods. C and L denote camera and LiDAR, respectively.
Figure 6: Qualitative visualizations . These results demonstrate that DVGT-2 can predict high-fidelity dense scene geometry and perform robust trajectory planning.
Method
Input
Aux. Sup.
L2 (m) ↓
Collision Rate (%) ↓
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
IL [ 57 ]
LiDAR
None
0.44
1.15
2.47
1.35
0.08
0.27
1.95
0.77
NMP [ 83 ]
LiDAR
Box & Motion
0.53
1.25
2.67
1.48
0.04
0.12
0.87
0.34
FF [ 14 ]
LiDAR
Freespace
0.55
1.20
2.54
1.43
0.06
0.17
1.07
0.43
EO [ 30 ]
LiDAR
Freespace
0.67
1.36
2.78
1.60
0.04
0.09
0.88
0.33
ST-P3 [ 15 ]
Camera
Map & Box & Depth
1.33
2.11
2.90
2.11
0.23
0.62
1.27
0.71
Table 7: Open-looped planning results on nuScenes [ 1 ] . † denotes the results computed with an average of previous frames as adopted in VAD [ 26 ] . Aux. Sup. represents auxiliary supervision. Avg. computes the average result of 1s, 2s, and 3s.
Figure 7: Efficiency comparison of online inference . We report the per-frame latency and memory cost of different methods on multi-frame, 8-view sequences.
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Table 15
Method
Paradigm
Acc ↓
Comp ↓
Abs Rel ↓
δ < 1.25↑
AUC@30 ↑
VGGT* [ 66 ]
Full-Seq.
1.154
1.294
0.158
0.801
96.91
MapAnything [ 29 ]
Full-Seq.
1.807
1.006
0.184
0.727
90.51
DVGT [ 93 ]
Full-Seq.
0.846
1.468
0.136
0.849
87.63
CUT3R* [ 67 ]
Streaming
0.973
2.054
0.217
0.660
51.82
StreamVGGT* [ 92 ]
Streaming
3.393
2.181
0.365
0.467
95.57
Driv3R* [ 7 ]
Streaming
0.864
1.083
0.164
0.784
-
Appendix
Table A.3: Quantitative 3D geometry reconstruction results on KITTI [ 10 ] . * denotes performing post-alignment with sparse LiDAR to recover the metric scale.
Dataset
Train Scenes
Test Scenes
Min Frames
Max Frames
Avg Frames
Avg Aspect Ratio
Num of Views
nuScenes
700
150
32
41
40
1.77
6
OpenScene
19376
2026
1
41
38
1.77
8
Waymo
798
202
34
40
40
1.77
5
KITTI
138
13
2
1033
62
3.31
2
DDAD
150
50
10
20
17
1.59
6
Appendix
Table A.4 : Detailed statistics of the datasets used in our experiments. All temporal statistics are reported at a 2Hz sampling rate.
Vision-language-action~(VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving. However, existing VLA models still suffer from a fundamental mismatch: driving actions require precise 3D geometric cues, while visual-language understanding and reasoning are largely conducted in a 2D semantic space. In this paper, we propose GeoCoTDrive, an explicit geometric chain-of-thought framework that grounds geometry in a planning-oriented manner. GeoCoTDrive follows a think with 2D first, drive with dedicated 3D priors paradigm. It first grounds 2D regions corresponding to decision-critical cues, and then retrieves localized 3D priors by sampling features from a geometric foundation model within the grounded regions. These localized geometric features are interleaved into the autoregressive context to support the trajectory generation. To supervise this process, we introduce planning-relevant grounding, a new region-level grounding task that focuses on local spatial cues directly affecting ego planning decisions, and construct the PlanningGrounding dataset to endow VLAs with planning-oriented grounding capability. Experiments across multiple end-to-end autonomous driving benchmarks show that GeoCoTDrive consistently improves safety-critical planning performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of the explicit geometric chain-of-thought process for VLA-based planning.
Xingtai Gui, Yucheng Zhou, Dongqian Guo +3
SKL-IOTSC, Department of AI, University of Macau · Afari Intelligent Drive
Vision-language-action (VLA) models can describe scenes and reason about them in language, yet still struggle to ground their actions in the dense 3D world around them. Existing approaches either inject features from a frozen 3D foundation model without an objective that ensures the policy uses them, or constrain geometry with sparse box and map losses that provide no dense spatial signal. We introduce VLGA, the first vision-language-action model supervised to reconstruct the dense 3D world it drives through. VLGA introduces geometry as a fourth modality alongside vision, language, and action through a dedicated expert supervised by a per-pixel pointmap regression loss against LiDAR. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets for open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, respectively, show the superiority of VLGA over counterpart VLA methods. In particular, on open-loop nuScenes, VLGA sets a new state of the art among VLA methods without ego status, with the lowest L2 (0.50,m average) and 3-second collision rate (0.18%). On closed-loop Bench2Drive, VLGA attains the state-of-the-art driving score of 79.08, +0.71 over the strongest prior VLA, at comparable efficiency and comfort.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving by leveraging foundation models for semantic reasoning and long-tail generalization. However, their planning performance remains limited in complex driving environments because image-only representations inadequately capture planning-relevant road geometry and topology. In this paper, we propose Geo-VLA, a plug-and-play framework that enhances VLA models by learning geometry-aware visual representations. During training, Geo-VLA internalizes geometric map semantics to strengthen road-structure representations, while requiring no HD maps or additional lane information during inference. To support this approach, we introduce Geo-QA, a geometry-focused question-answering dataset that injects road geometry into vision-language representations through contrastive learning and instruction tuning. Experiments on NAVSIM v1 demonstrate that Geo-VLA consistently improves VLA planners with distinct action-generation architectures, achieving 92.1 PDMS and establishing a new state-of-the-art among single-camera VLA planners.
Ran Chen, Jiaxing Ren, Zhikun Zhang +3
University of Science and Technology Beijing Beijing, China