Planning in the Backbone: DiffAdapterVLA for Native Continuous Trajectory Generation with Driving VLMs

Abstract

Pretrained driving vision-language models (VLMs) integrate visual, route, language, and driving context into rich driving priors, yet their representation objectives remain separated from continuous driving planning. Existing methods typically begin trajectory generation only after the VLM has formed a final condition, leaving depth-wise condition computation outside the stepwise formation of trajectory state. We introduce DiffAdapterVLA, which realizes Planning in the Backbone: it injects explicit trajectory tokens into selected VLM late layers, bringing trajectory state into backbone forward computation, where it co-evolves with driving conditions at different depths. Lightweight layer-wise DiffAdapters organize this computation into recursive trajectory refinement, while asymmetric joint attention preserves directed guidance from the condition stream to trajectory planning. By placing planning within existing backbone computation rather than relying on an independent trajectory planner, DiffAdapterVLA adapts only lightweight trajectory modules to turn existing driving priors into efficient continuous planning capability. NAVSIM results show that it achieves high-quality closed-loop planning with low end-to-end latency using few trainable parameters, and demonstrate that jointly evolving trajectory state and depth-wise driving conditions in VLM late-layer computation effectively realizes continuous trajectory planning.