Most end-to-end autonomous driving methods rely solely on instantaneous sensor observations, limiting them to reactive behavior without the anticipatory foresight human drivers employ through prior experience. We introduce geospatial visual priors, street-level visual context anchored to the intended driving route, providing visual-spatial foresight independent of real-time sensors. We propose a memory augmentation module featuring a dual-memory architecture and an adaptive memory gate, which can be easily integrated into existing end-to-end approaches. This design pairs a contextual memory for retrieved priors with a persistent fallback memory, and dynamically regulates the influence of memories based on current state compatibility. Evaluated on the NAVSIM-v2 benchmark, our approach consistently improves performance across diverse end-to-end baselines. Furthermore, because these priors are independent of onboard sensors, our method inherently improves robustness against sensor corruption, while the dual-memory design ensures safe fallback when the retrieved priors themselves become unreliable. Our project page is available at https://ori-mrg.github.io/PriorEye.
End-to-end autonomous driving models plan future trajectories from raw sensor input. While earlier driving benchmarks often measured deviation from the human trajectory, current benchmarks such as NAVSIM and Bench2Drive evaluate models with richer simulation-based metrics intended to capture safe and compliant driving. A high benchmark score should reflect that a model can understand the scene in front of it and act accordingly. But how much of that score specifically comes from reacting to the dynamic part of that scene? To probe this, we remove a model's camera input and replace it with memories from prior drives at the same location. The retrieved memories can provide persistent scene information, including road layout and location-conditioned regularities, but not the current traffic state. Surprisingly, memory is nearly sufficient on NAVSIM, reaching or even exceeding the performance of leading end-to-end methods without actually observing the evaluated scene. Our results suggest that a high NAVSIM score does not require a planner to react to the current traffic scene and should be treated with caution. This effect is benchmark-dependent: driving from memory causes substantially larger performance drops on Bench2Drive and RealEngine. We provide our code at https://github.com/boschresearch/MemoryDrivoR .
Christian Löwens, Thorben Funke, Alexandru Paul Condurache
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving by enabling unified reasoning across perception, language, and planning. However, existing approaches lack mechanisms to exploit past failures or adapt to distribution shifts, causing the model to persistently underperform on similar scenarios where it has previously failed. In this paper, we propose DriveVLA-M0, a retrieval-augmented VLA with failure-aware latent memory. We construct a latent memory pool that stores failure cases along with their structure scene representations and expert trajectory labels, and design a dedicated Retrieve Model that decouples static road structure and dynamic agent interactions to enable structurally grounded retrieval. At inference time, retrieved cases are injected into the model via a lightweight decoupled LoRA-based test-time training (TTT) mechanism, allowing targeted and scenario-specific correction without modifying the backbone. Extensive experiments on NAVSIMv1 and NAVSIMv2 benchmark demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving 94.1 PDMS on Navtest and 47.0 EPDMS on Navhard with only 26.44 ms TTT backward latency overhead. Furthermore, we show that DriveVLA-M0 scales effectively with additional memory, enabling training-free performance gains through memory expansion. The code is available at https://github.com/ZebinX/DriveVLA-M0.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet their reliance on implicit parametric knowledge limits generalization in long-tail scenarios. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a solution by accessing external expert priors, standard visual retrieval suffers from high latency and semantic ambiguity. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{VLADriver-RAG}, a framework that grounds planning in explicit, structure-aware historical knowledge. Specifically, we abstract sensory inputs into spatiotemporal semantic graphs via a \textit{Visual-to-Scenario} mechanism, effectively filtering visual noise. To ensure retrieval relevance, we employ a \textit{Scenario-Aligned Embedding Model} that utilizes Graph-DTW metric alignment to prioritize intrinsic topological consistency over superficial visual similarity. These retrieved priors are then fused within a query-based VLA backbone to synthesize precise, disentangled trajectories. Extensive experiments on the Bench2Drive benchmark establish a new state-of-the-art, achieving a Driving Score of 89.12.