End-to-end autonomous driving models are now able to navigate complex road scenarios, mapping raw sensor observations directly to observed paths for open-loop evaluation and often effective driving in closed-loop evaluation. Yet the internal logic of these safety-critical systems remains largely opaque, due to the complexity of traffic scenes.
arXiv:2606. 24759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision.
By Xiaowei Gao, Pengxiang Li, Yitai Cheng, Ruihan Xu, James Haworth, Stephen Law, Yun Ye
arXiv:2603. 06054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios.
By Nikos Theodoridis, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Anthony Scanlan, Ciar\'an Eising, Tim Brophy
arXiv:2606. 17362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent.
By Xinglong Sun, Kevin Xie, Jenny Schmalfuss, Despoina Paschalidou, Xiuming Zhang, Sanja Fidler, Kashyap Chitta, Jose M. Alvarez
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations.
arXiv:2605. 06264v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models generate future trajectories from multi-view inputs, improving system integration but introducing opaque decisions and hard-to-localize risks.
By Le Yang, Haijun Liu, Jiawei Liang, ShangQuan Sun, Xiaochun Cao
arXiv:2607. 00283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous vehicles must safely navigate complex environments where planning-critical agents may be hidden from view.
By Amirhosein Chahe, Tyler Naes, Jovin D'sa, Faizan M. Tariq, Sangjae Bae, Lifeng Zhou, David Isele
arXiv:2606. 15749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics.
By Maonan Wang, Zhengyan Huang, Kemou Jiang, Yuhang Fu, Jiayue Zhu, Yuxin Cai, Xingchen Zou, Qiaosheng Zhang, Yi Yu, Ding Wang, Xi Chen, Ben M. Chen, Yuxuan Liang, Zhiyong Cui, Man On Pun, Yirong Chen
Traffic microsimulators rely on hand-crafted behavior models that reproduce aggregate flow but miss the heterogeneous interactions between vehicles at signalized intersections. Learned trajectory predictors capture richer interactions but are short-horizon and tend to be unstable when run in closed loop.
arXiv:2607. 08745v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Vision-Language Models, Large Language Models, and Multimodal Large Language Models have improved autonomous driving tasks such as scene understanding, decision making, trajectory prediction, and visual question answering.
By Siddharth Damodharan, Radhika Gupta, Ali Alshami, Ryan Rabinowitz, Jugal Kalita
arXiv:2608. 01755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving (AD) increasingly utilize chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision to enhance the reasoning capabilities of their Vision-Language Model (VLM) components, yet existing annotation pipelines commonly expose the teacher model to the logged ground-truth (GT) future trajectory.
By Zixuan Huang, Yang Zhou, Kaixuan Wang, Guli Zhang, Hongyan Xie, Yakun Zhu, Hao Geng, Xiaozhi Chen, Yikun Ban, Deqing Wang
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.
By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari