RAF-VLA: Representation Alignment with the Future for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

RAF-VLA: Representation Alignment with the Future for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

|Authors: Dogun Kim, Yongjae Lee, Joonhee Lim, Yeina Lee, Junhyeok Park, Moogeun Park, Dongsuk Kum

|Venue: arXiv preprint | Year: 2026

|arXiv: 2609.17728

Abstract

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving have incorporated world modeling by predicting future driving scenes alongside driving actions, demonstrating strong planning performance. Future driving scenes are utilized as dense supervision, encouraging the policy to learn rich internal representations useful for planning. However, these World-Modeling VLAs rely on explicit future generation to learn such representations, thereby introducing two key limitations: additional training burden and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose RAF-VLA (Representation Alignment with the Future), a VLA-based autonomous driving framework that shapes planning-relevant internal representations through direct guidance from future-frame representations. RAF-VLA employs Future-Aligned Supervised Fine-Tuning, in which a straightforward regularization aligns the policy’s hidden states with future-frame representations obtained from a pretrained world encoder while learning driving actions. This simple alignment allows RAF-VLA to avoid the training burden and inference latency associated with future generation. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark show that RAF-VLA achieves competitive planning performance against state-of-the-art VLA planners with substantially fewer training samples seen. Moreover, RAF-VLA incurs only 3.8% training overhead and a negligible 1 ms inference overhead.

Key Contributions

• Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving have incorporated world modelin…
• Future driving scenes are utilized as dense supervision, encouraging the policy to learn rich int…
• However, these World-Modeling VLAs rely on explicit future generation to learn such representatio…
• To address these limitations, we propose RAF-VLA (Representation Alignment with the Future), a VL…
• RAF-VLA employs Future-Aligned Supervised Fine-Tuning, in which a straightforward regularization …

Topics

• vision
• vla
• reinforcement-learning
• planning
• benchmark

Code & Data

• GitHub repository: https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/OpenScene

BibTeX

@article{Kim2026_260917728,
  title     = {RAF-VLA: Representation Alignment with the Future for End-to-End Autonomous Driving},
  author    = {Dogun Kim and Yongjae Lee and Joonhee Lim and Yeina Lee and Junhyeok Park and Moogeun Park and Dongsuk Kum},
  year      = {2026},
  eprint    = {2609.17728},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.RO},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17728}
}