Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory

Kai Yan, Xiangyu Chen, Yulong Cao, Alex Naumann, Peter Karkus +7

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have recently emerged as one of the prevailing solutions for autonomous driving, as they can utilize knowledge acquired during vision-language pretraining for accurate and interpretable driving. However, VLAs can take only a limited number of frames as visual input due to the high token cost of an image, which is problematic for memory-dependent tasks such as determining the arrival order at all-way stops and long-horizon driving scene understanding. Existing solutions use latent vector memories accessed through cross-attention, which are neither interpretable nor portable. In this paper, we propose AD-Memo, a general-purpose VLA driving agent with language-based memory. The agent outputs memory as an extension of its Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to record surrounding objects critical to driving; this memory becomes part of the agent's future input. We curate memory-based datasets and train VLAs with a two-stage recipe: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and \textit{Da Capo}, a novel semi-closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm which uses trajectory-level advantage for memory and step-level advantage for driving, leading to better…