DriveFoundry: Co-Evolving Data and Model for Efficient Closed-Loop Iteration in Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2611.11532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A driving foundation model must learn reusable decision knowledge from rare critical events and apply it under strict runtime constraints. We introduce DriveFoundry, a closed-loop framework improving iteration efficiency under data and computation budgets by coupling structured causal data refinement with adaptive inference. The Data Engine builds traceable scene-candidate records linking scene evidence and factor-decision relations to candidate trajectories and outcome assessments. Candidate comparisons and counterfactual annotations clarify how scene factors affect behavioral feasibility and preference. Verified model failures guide VLM-assisted annotation and expert correction, refining training data and annotation systems. The model engine, Xiaomi-Drive-o1, unifies Perception, Causation, Action, World, and Value within a shared vision-language backbone to enable cross-task knowledge transfer. Block-wise latent refill passes candidate-specific evidence and predicted visual consequences between task blocks, connecting scene understanding, planning, and evaluation. A learned value-of-computation head selects tasks and allocates latent tokens based on expected benefit and cost, adapting inference to each decision. On PhysicalAI, the 9B model achieves the lowest ADE@1 across evaluated splits and horizons among tested models. In AlpaSim, it outperforms Alpamayo 1.5 across all metrics and achieves lower close-encounter and off-road rates than the 34B Alpamayo 2 Super, while trailing in progress and AlpaSim scores. For the 0.8B variant, joint training reduces 5 s minADE@6 by about 54% without altering the inference path or token budget. Adaptive inference matches full reasoning performance using only 28% of tokens. Real-vehicle tests confirm runtime feasibility, supporting a unified paradigm for learning from critical experience and dynamically allocating computation.