An October 14 technical report says VITAL, an AI driving planner, scored 90.8 on NAVSIM, a simulated-driving benchmark, with one trajectory update, within 0.13 points of the same planner’s ten-update score. The authors report that one update ran 3.29 times faster end to end than ten on an RTX 4090.
In a reconstruction diagnostic, recorded camera frames from later in a four-second drive window were paired with a demonstrated trajectory. The visual representation recovered the broad maneuver, but its decoded route still missed centimeter-scale position details. VITAL therefore pairs a visual-motion “scaffold” with a compact residual that encodes the remaining trajectory error in vehicle coordinates.
At inference, the planner predicts both parts from the current front-camera image, vehicle state and navigation command; it does not first generate future video. A single evaluation of the action model decodes a four-second plan with 40 position-and-heading points. The ten-step comparison uses ten successive evaluations of the same model along its flow trajectory before decoding the route. A bounded residual correction then adjusts only the residual, leaving the predicted visual scaffold in place.
PDMS is a 0-to-100 score that summarizes collision avoidance, road compliance, progress and comfort. The project page rounds the NAVSIM v1 results to 90.8 for one update and 91.0 for ten. On one RTX 4090 at batch size one, it reports 149 milliseconds for one update and 490 milliseconds for ten, including image encoding and residual correction.
The reported scores come from simulation, not a road test, and the timing is for a desktop GPU rather than a vehicle computer. The authors train the residual correction against NAVSIM task rewards, with added penalties for regressions in selected performance criteria; they warn that a bounded update can still lower that training objective or fail task-level safety requirements in an individual case.
Sources
- VITAL technical report (arXiv, submitted October 14, 2026)
- Project page, results and evaluation details
- Illustrative photo: Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. The pictured Waymo car is in Austin and is not part of the VITAL study.
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