CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

CoWorld-VLA introduces a multi-expert reasoning framework with explicit world representations to improve autonomous driving planning, demonstrating competitive results in scene generation and trajectory accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multi-expert world reasoning framework with explicit tokens and a diffusion-based planner for end-to-end autonomous driving.

Findings

Achieves strong performance in collision avoidance and trajectory accuracy.

Validates the effectiveness of expert tokens as planning conditions.

Demonstrates competitive results on the NAVSIM v1 benchmark.

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing reasoning mechanisms still struggle to provide planning-oriented intermediate representations: textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fails to preserve continuous spatiotemporal structure, while latent world reasoning remains difficult to use as a direct condition for action generation. In this paper, we propose CoWorld-VLA, a multi-expert world reasoning framework for autonomous driving, where world representations serve as explicit conditions to guide action planning. CoWorld-VLA extracts complementary world information through multi-source supervision and encodes it into expert tokens within the VLA, thereby providing planner-accessible conditioning signals. Specifically, we construct four types of tokens: semantic interaction, geometric structure, dynamic evolution, and ego trajectory tokens, which respectively model interaction intent, spatial structure, future temporal dynamics, and behavioral goals. During action generation, CoWorld-VLA employs a diffusion-based hierarchical multi-expert fusion planner, which is coupled with scene context throughout the joint denoising process to generate continuous ego trajectories. Experiments show that CoWorld-VLA achieves competitive results in both future scene generation and planning on the NAVSIM v1 benchmark, demonstrating strong performance in collision avoidance and trajectory accuracy. Ablation studies further validate the complementarity of expert tokens and their effectiveness as planning conditions for action generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/AFARI-Research/CoWorld-VLA.