Conventional end-to-end (E2E) driving models are effective at generating physically plausible trajectories, but often fail to generalize to long-tail scenarios due to the lack of essential world knowledge to understand and reason about surrounding environments. In contrast, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage world knowledge to handle challenging cases, but their limited 3D reasoning capability can lead to physically infeasible actions. In this work we introduce DiffVLA++, an enhanced autonomous driving framework that explicitly bridges cognitive reasoning and E2E planning through metric-guided alignment. First, we build a VLA module directly generating semantically grounded driving trajectories. Second, we design an E2E module with a dense trajectory vocabulary that ensures physical feasibility. Third, and most critically, we introduce a metric-guided trajectory scorer that guides and aligns the outputs of the VLA and E2E modules, thereby integrating their complementary strengths. The experiment on the ICCV 2025 Autonomous Grand Challenge leaderboard shows that our model achieves EPDMS of 49.12.

In this paper, we propose HE-Drive: the first human-like-centric end-to-end autonomous driving system to generate trajectories that are both temporally consistent and comfortable. Recent studies have shown that imitation learning-based planners and learning-based trajectory scorers can effectively generate and select accuracy trajectories that closely mimic expert demonstrations. However, such trajectory planners and scorers face the dilemma of generating temporally inconsistent and uncomfortable trajectories. To solve the above problems, Our HE-Drive first extracts key 3D spatial representations through sparse perception, which then serves as conditional inputs for a Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs)-based motion planner to generate temporal consistency multi-modal trajectories. A Vision-Language Models (VLMs)-guided trajectory scorer subsequently selects the most comfortable trajectory from these candidates to control the vehicle, ensuring human-like end-to-end driving. Experiments show that HE-Drive not only achieves state-of-the-art performance (i.e., reduces the average collision rate by 71% than VAD) and efficiency (i.e., 1.9X faster than SparseDrive) on the challenging nuScenes and OpenScene datasets but also provides the most comfortable driving experience on real-world data.For more information, visit the project website: https://jmwang0117.github.io/HE-Drive/.