Wenyuan Zhang

Yan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Junjie Bai et al. · nvidia

End-to-end architectures trained via imitation learning have advanced autonomous driving by scaling model size and data, yet performance remains brittle in safety-critical long-tail scenarios where supervision is sparse and causal understanding is limited. To address this, we introduce Alpamayo-R1 (AR1), a vision-language-action model (VLA) that integrates Chain of Causation reasoning with trajectory planning to enhance decision-making in complex driving scenarios. Our approach features three key innovations: (1) the Chain of Causation (CoC) dataset, built through a hybrid auto-labeling and human-in-the-loop pipeline producing decision-grounded, causally linked reasoning traces aligned with driving behaviors; (2) a modular VLA architecture combining Cosmos-Reason, a Vision-Language Model pre-trained for Physical AI applications, with a diffusion-based trajectory decoder that generates dynamically feasible plans in real time; (3) a multi-stage training strategy using supervised fine-tuning to elicit reasoning and reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize reasoning quality via large reasoning model feedback and enforce reasoning-action consistency. Evaluation shows AR1 achieves up to a 12% improvement in planning accuracy on challenging cases compared to a trajectory-only baseline, with a 35% reduction in off-road rate and 25% reduction in close encounter rate in closed-loop simulation. RL post-training improves reasoning quality by 45% as measured by a large reasoning model critic and reasoning-action consistency by 37%. Model scaling from 0.5B to 7B parameters shows consistent improvements. On-vehicle road tests confirm real-time performance (99 ms latency) and successful urban deployment. By bridging interpretable reasoning with precise control, AR1 demonstrates a practical path towards Level 4 autonomous driving. We plan to release AR1 models and a subset of the CoC in a future update.

Yu Zhang, Rui Yu, Zhipeng Yao et al.

The Mean Square Error (MSE) is commonly utilized to estimate the solution of the optimal value function in the vast majority of offline reinforcement learning (RL) models and has achieved outstanding performance. However, we find that its principle can lead to overestimation phenomenon for the value function. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze overestimation phenomenon led by MSE and provide the theoretical upper bound of the overestimated error. Furthermore, to address it, we propose a novel Bellman underestimated operator to counteract overestimation phenomenon and then prove its contraction characteristics. At last, we propose the offline RL algorithm based on underestimated operator and diffusion policy model. Extensive experimental results on D4RL tasks show that our method can outperform state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms, which demonstrates that our theoretical analysis and underestimation way are effective for offline RL tasks.