Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics. Existing end-to-end driving approaches, however, typically emphasize only one side of this requirement: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exploit VLM priors for semantic reasoning, while World Action Models (WAMs) provide future-aware prediction through generative world modeling. This naturally motivates a unified planner that can leverage both semantic priors and predictive dynamics. However, we find that a naive combination through joint token-level attention suffers from an attention-allocation mismatch, where semantic shortcuts dominate the shared attention space and suppress predictive dynamics. Inspired by neuroscience evidence that complex behavior arises from coordination among functionally specialized systems, we propose BrainWAM, a structured action-space coordination framework that converts semantic reasoning and predictive world modeling into two specialized action-oriented pathways, and aligns them at the level of compact action representations. We further introduce an asynchronous rectified-flow inference strategy with decoupled video and action denoising, which shortens inference latency while preserving planning-relevant predictive context. BrainWAM reaches state-of-the-art performance on both NAVSIM v1 (89.5 PDMS) and NAVSIM v2 (89.6 EPDMS), consistently outperforming VLA-only or WAM-only methods, highlighting BrainWAM as a practical and promising direction for autonomous driving systems.
World-Action Models (WAMs) improve end-to-end autonomous driving by transferring video dynamics priors to action prediction, but existing methods incur costly test-time future imagination. We present SimWAM, a simple yet effective WAM that leverages future-video prediction as a training-time supervision signal. It co-trains a pretrained video expert and a lightweight action expert with joint flow matching. An isolated attention mask keeps action prediction independent of future frames, allowing trajectory prediction without explicit future-frame generation at inference. Since the two experts share no parameters and interact only through a unified attention interface, the video backbone could be replaced and the action expert scaled independently without modifying the learning objective or inference pipeline. We further apply reinforcement learning to optimize a compositional driving reward beyond trajectory imitation. Our SimWAM achieves 91.5 PDMS on NAVSIM, surpasses state-of-the-art WAM-based planners with substantially lower latency, and transfers zero-shot to nuScenes. These results position SimWAM as a simple yet solid baseline that could readily benefit from advances in video generation for efficient autonomous driving. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/SimWAM/.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing methods either lack comprehensive world cognition or suffer from fragmented world foresight, inherently confining these models to reactive driving. To address this limitation, we propose WCog-VLA, a novel dual-level World-Cognitive VLA framework that successfully bridges semantic world forecasting with generative world evolution to achieve proactive autonomous driving. At the semantic level, WCog-VLA unifies world cognition and reasoning by incorporating 3D spatial perception and injecting agent tokens to capture the world dynamics, while concurrently enabling Game-theoretic Chain-of-Thought (Game-CoT) reasoning. At the generative level, we introduce the Aligned Decoupled Diffusion Transformer (ADDT) as a powerful generative world model that synthesizes physically-plausible joint multi-agent trajectories. Through scene representation alignment, ADDT reduces the number of denoising steps required and thus significantly accelerates inference. To facilitate strategic reasoning, we further construct a large-scale dataset featuring 85k Game-CoT annotations. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that WCog-VLA achieves a State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) PDMS score of 92.9.
Pretrained foundation models have become an important basis for end-to-end autonomous driving. In contrast to vision-language models pretrained primarily on static image-text pairs, video generative models capture temporal dynamics and motion priors that are naturally suited for driving. We present DriveWAM, a driving world-action model that adapts a pretrained video diffusion transformer into an autoregressive video-action policy. DriveWAM organizes video and action streams into a unified temporal token sequence and trains them under a joint flow-matching objective, preserving the pretrained video-generation architecture while adapting its large-scale video priors to action generation. To incorporate high-level scene understanding, we introduce scene-evolving driving guidance, where a frozen VLM produces chunk-specific semantic intent to guide video-action generation. To keep long-horizon rollout bounded, we further introduce selective KV memory, which maintains bounded modality-aware video and action memory pools through relevance-redundancy cache selection at inference time. Experiments on NAVSIM and the PhysicalAI-Autonomous-Vehicles benchmark show that DriveWAM achieves strong planning performance, and a data-scaling study from 4k to 100k driving clips further confirms the scaling potential of world-action modeling for end-to-end autonomous driving.