Evaluation Is All You Need for Multi-Modal Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2609.30818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-modal planning is promising for autonomous driving by representing multiple plausible behaviors in ambiguous and long-tail scenarios. Existing methods mainly focus on improving trajectory multi-modality, enhancing trajectory representations, or reshaping the candidate distribution. Nevertheless, we identify a pronounced generation-evaluation asymmetry in multi-modal planning: despite strong oracle performance, existing planners often fail to reliably select the best available candidate, leaving substantial planning potential unrealized. To address this challenge, we propose iDriveVLA, a multi-modal planning framework that improves the candidate trajectory space while enabling more reliable and context-aware trajectory evaluation. Specifically, iDriveVLA introduces a unified trajectory evaluator comprising a Safety-aware Scorer for quality and risk estimation, together with a VLM-guided Modulator for scene-adaptive criterion weighting. We further develop an oracle-aligned progressive training strategy consisting of candidate imitation pretraining, candidate space refinement, and semantic ranking alignment. On the public NAVSIM v1 leaderboard, iDriveVLA achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 94.95 PDMS, surpassing the human-expert reference.