LaViPlan : Language-Guided Visual Path Planning with RLVR

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios in autonomous driving refer to situations that deviate from the training domain, often leading to unexpected and potentially hazardous behavior from planners that lack prior exposure to such cases. Recently, Vision-LLMs (VLMs) have been introduced into autonomous driving research for their promising generalization capabilities in OOD settings. Early studies demonstrated that VLMs could recognize OOD scenarios and generate user-level decisions such as "go straight" or "turn right." However, a new challenge has emerged due to the misalignment between the VLM's high-level decisions or visual reasoning expressed in language, and the low-level predicted trajectories interpreted as actions. In this paper, we propose LaViPlan, a framework that leverages Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to optimize VLMs using planning-oriented metrics. This approach addresses the vision-language-action misalignment observed in existing VLMs fine-tuned via supervised learning, which can recognize driving scenarios but often produce context-unaware decisions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves situational awareness and decision-making under OOD conditions, highlighting its potential to mitigate the misalignment issue. This work introduces a promising post-training paradigm for VLM agents in the context of autonomous driving.