Zhixuan You

Author directory

2026

Vision-language-action (VLA) models for autonomous driving typically express intermediate reasoning entirely in text, which may discard decision-relevant visual information. We propose Latent Dreaming (LatDM), a latent–text reasoning framework that complements textual chain-of-thought with continuous latent states. LatDM uses latent blocks to preserve visually grounded spatial and temporal information, while text handles semantic abstraction and decision communication. A pretrained visual encoder provides latent supervision during training, and the model autonomously interleaves latent and textual reasoning at inference. Experiments on VLADBench, CODA-LM, and NuInstruct show consistent improvements over the underlying VLA backbone, while ablations confirm that the latent channel contributes beyond standard textual fine-tuning.