WCog-VLA: A Dual-Level World-Cognitive Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

X Yan, Z Lian, N Zhang, S Fang, H Wang, C Lv… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2026 - arxiv.org
arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.08375, 2026arxiv.org
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 …
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.
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