Model Releases
FlashDrive: Flash Vision-Language-Action Inference for Autonomous Driving
arXiv:2608.12932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise to bring end-to-end reasoning to autonomous driving, but their computational cost remains far too high for r
arXiv:2608.12932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise to bring end-to-end reasoning to autonomous driving, but their computational cost remains far too high for real-time control. The core challenge is structural: VLA inference is not a single bottleneck but a cascade of four. Visual encoding wastes compute on overlapping video frames; language-model prefill recomputes context that could be carried over from the previous timestep; reasoning tokens are generated serially despite low entropy; and flow-matching denoising applies uniform compute to a non-uniform velocity field. Addressing any one stage in isolation leaves the others untouched. We propose FlashDrive, an algorithm-system co-design framework that targets all four stages simultaneously. Our key insight is that each bottleneck admits a distinct, lightweight algorithmic shortcut: temporal overlap enables streaming KV-cache reuse across frames; the low per-token entropy and strong intra-block correlations of driving-domain reasoning make a non-autoregressive diffusion drafter highly effective for speculative decoding; and the velocity field's structure---sharp at the endpoints, flat in the middle---permits adaptive step caching that concentrates compute where it matters. Layered on system-level CUDA Graph compilation and kernel fusion, these techniques compound. Applied to Alpamayo 1.5-10B with W4A8 quantization, FlashDrive reduces end-to-end latency from 717ms to 151ms (4.7x) while leaving accuracy essentially unchanged: minADE6@6.4s shifts by only 0.08m, minADE1 improves, and closed-loop collision and off-road rates improve in simulation. By raising a 10B-parameter reasoning VLA from 1.4Hz to 6.6Hz on a single GPU, FlashDrive moves end-to-end autonomous driving substantially closer to real-time deployment.
Related
- CMU-Drive and V2V-VLA: Cooperative Multi-agent Unified Driving with Reasoning Benchmark and Vehicle-to-Vehicle Vision-Language-Action Models
- CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving
- VLADriver-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving
- WCog-VLA: A Dual-Level World-Cognitive Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- HyWorldVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Hybrid World Modeling for Autonomous Driving
Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-14