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: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:2608. 04776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The ability to accurately assess and anticipate risks in safety-critical scenarios is crucial for autonomous driving systems.
By Yu Zhao, Jiangyu Pan, Tao Hu, Ming Yin, Fan Yang, Jiangfan Liu, Xiubo Liang
Safe autonomous driving requires both rapid responses to common high-risk events and deeper reasoning over rare, extreme long-tail scenarios in traffic safety. These scenarios are severely under-represented in naturalistic driving data, and existing trajectory and language-augmented datasets seldom provide high-risk event labels, semantic annotations, and verifiable safety signals.
RiskCueBench is a new video‑understanding benchmark that focuses on early risk cues in video‑language models. The dataset annotates the earliest moment in a video that signals a potential safety concern, rather than providing the full sequence that includes the accident. Experiments show a notable gap in current systems’ ability to interpret evolving situations and anticipate future risky events from these early visual signals.
By Sha Luo, Yogesh Prabhu, Timothy Ossowski, Kaiping Chen, Junjie Hu
arXiv:2607. 07103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe autonomous driving requires both rapid responses to common high-risk events and deeper reasoning over rare, extreme long-tail scenarios in traffic safety.
By Heye Huang, Jingguang Li, Zhiyuan Zhou, Paul Liang, Mingyu Wu, Kitae Jang, Jianqiang Wang
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
STRIDE (SpatioTemporal Reasoning In Driving Edge Cases) is a new benchmark designed to evaluate vision-language models on complex, safety-critical driving scenarios. It includes six task families—spatial perception, spatial understanding, temporal memory, temporal extrapolation, trajectory prediction, and scene-context awareness—using multiple-choice questions and free-form visual question answering that require detailed scene explanations and driving decision justifications. The benchmark focuses on unusual object behaviors and complex traffic interactions, and results show that even the best model, GPT‑6‑Astra, scores only 43.4% on average, highlighting significant gaps in spatiotemporal reasoning.
By Lieqi Liu, Rui gao, Jia-Chen Gu, Wenbo Hu, Zhaobin Mo, Ahmadreza Moradipari, Nejib Ammar, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng
arXiv:2608. 14767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vehicles must explain their decisions in ways that passengers can understand, monitor, and trust.
By Ashkan Yousefi Zadeh, Zishuo Zhu, Xiaomeng Li, Andry Rakotonirainy, Sebastien Glaser, Ronald Schroeter, Patricia Delhomme, Zahra Mehraban
arXiv:2608. 19380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While modern autonomous driving systems excel at perception tasks such as object detection and trajectory prediction, they lack the high-level causal reasoning required to interpret traffic accidents.
By Sparsh Garg, Yi-Wen Chen, Vijay Kumar B G, Abhishek Aich
arXiv:2606. 12047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of zero-shot understanding of accidents from surveillance videos by identifying when an impact event occurs, what type of impact it is, and where in the frame it occurs using natural language.
By Tarandeep Singh, Soumyanetra Pal, Soham Biswas, Nishanth Chandran
HERMES is a holistic end‑to‑end multimodal driving framework that incorporates long‑tail semantic knowledge into trajectory planning for autonomous vehicles. It uses a foundation‑model‑assisted annotation pipeline to build Long‑Tail Scene Context and Long‑Tail Planning Context, capturing hazard‑centric scene information, maneuver intent, and risk‑aware guidance. A Tri‑Modal Driving Module then fuses multi‑view visual observations, historical ego‑motion, and long‑tail semantic instructions to generate intent‑ and risk‑aware trajectories, achieving consistent performance gains on a large‑scale real‑world long‑tail driving benchmark.
By Weizhe Tang, Junwei You, Jiaxi Liu, Zhaoyi Wang, Rui Gan, Zilin Huang, Feng Wei, Bin Ran