The paper introduces CoLT-Drive, a 3,536-sample counterfactual long‑tail benchmark for evaluating decision‑level driving affordance prediction, which tests whether models can infer how rare objects affect an ego vehicle’s high‑level actions. It also proposes KPA, a knowledge‑preserving adaptation framework that combines structured prompting, expert merging, and a regime‑aware LoRA mixture‑of‑experts module to improve small VLMs on driving tasks. Experiments show KPA achieves 60.8% pair accuracy on CoLT‑Drive, outperforming the Qwen3‑VL‑2B baseline and LoRA SFT while keeping competitive in‑domain performance.
arXiv:2602. 23499v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Collecting a high-quality dataset is a critical task that demands meticulous attention to detail, as overlooking certain aspects can render the entire dataset unusable.
arXiv:2512. 05277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.
arXiv:2607. 00283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous vehicles must safely navigate complex environments where planning-critical agents may be hidden from view.
arXiv:2607. 13319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-speed off-road autonomy requires precise closed-loop control for a target vehicle while remaining robust across changing terrains.
arXiv:2512. 05277v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.
arXiv:2609.22762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative world-action models (WAMs) jointly generate future video and vehicle actions, while their action branches remain primarily optimized by expe...
The paper introduces Endpoint-Constrained Optimization (ECO), a lightweight postprocessing layer that corrects intermediate waypoints of end-to-end driving policies while preserving the predicted endpoint. ECO does not require maps, privileged simulator state, or additional training, and can be applied to a wide range of waypoint-emitting policies. Experiments on two closed-loop simulators show that ECO significantly improves closed-loop performance, achieving top results in the HUGSIM Closed-Loop Driving Challenge and boosting scene scores on AlpaSim.
LightEMMA is a longitudinal evaluation framework that tests the autonomous driving performance of vision‑language models (VLMs) without fine‑tuning or prompt engineering. Using this protocol, the authors evaluated 15 VLMs from five major families on the nuScenes prediction benchmark and found that larger, more capable models do not consistently outperform earlier generations. The study identifies common failure modes such as overreliance on historical actions and difficulty reconciling conflicting visual cues, underscoring the need for domain‑specific adaptation to enhance VLM safety in autonomous driving.
arXiv:2610.16985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models show strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by leveraging world knowledge and understanding to excel...
The paper evaluates five vision‑language models on autonomous driving tasks under various visual input conditions, finding that visual corruption affects accuracy and confidence differently across models and datasets. It then tests Visual Evidence Augmentation (VEA) as an inference‑time technique to enhance reliability, observing mixed improvements depending on the model and setting.
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
arXiv:2610.23262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Candidate-based end-to-end driving planners reason over a finite set of trajectory hypotheses. However, for sparse planners, a limited candidate set...