The paper introduces DriveMind, a large-scale driving Visual Question Answering corpus that aligns chain-of-thought reasoning with trajectory planning. Experiments with Vision‑Language Model agents show a causal disconnect: removing navigation priors significantly harms planning, while removing the chain-of-thought has little effect. The authors propose the Reasoning‑Planning Decoupling Hypothesis and present a training‑free probe to assess an agent’s reliance on priors.
By Xurui Song, Shuo Huai, JingJing Jiang, Jiayi Kong, Jun Luo
arXiv:2609. 28366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to long-tail autonomous driving, but existing driving datasets provide limited supervision for connecting decision-critical visual evidence with reasoning and planning.
By Zhipeng Bao, Wenjie Zhao, Tianle Zhu, Haohua Que, Chence Yang, Geng Yuan, Qianwen Li
arXiv:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...
By Changjiang Jiang, Qiannian Zhao, Lei Xin, Jinxiang Xie, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
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:2607. 03182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving planning requires translating navigation intent, traffic rules, dynamic interactions, and language instructions into executable continuous trajectories.
By Qi Liu, Yabei Li, Hongsong Wang, Heng Zhang, Lei He
arXiv:2608. 01035v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a prominent paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving; however, their efficient deployment is severely constrained by high computational latency and exposure bias arising from sequential autoregressive decoding.
By Zhihao Zhu, Hanlin Shang, Mingwang Xu, Feipeng Cai, Zhuolin He, Yaoyi Li, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Siyu Zhu
arXiv:2606. 29879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide powerful semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) planning.
By Chen Yang, Yuhao Wei, Ze Xu, Ziheng Zou, Shuang Liang, Delin Ouyang, Lingfeng Qi, Jie Li, Guofa Li
arXiv:2607. 10383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual Language Navigation foundation models aim to unify deep reasoning for grounded spatial decisions with broad versatility for diverse embodied tasks.
By Ruiyan Gong, Yingnan Guo, Junjun Hu, Jintao Kong, Xiaoxu Leng, Tianlun Li, Weize Li, Fei Liu, Zhicheng Liu, Jia Lu, Minghua Luo, Chenlin Ming, Yanfen Shen, Jiyue Tao, Zhengbo Wang, Mingyang Yin, Minqi Gu, Zihao Guan, Wei Guo, Guoqing Liu, Huachong Pang, Menglin Yang, Zeqian Ye, Xiaoxiao Geng, Zhining Gu, Honglin Han, Di Jing, Hongyu Pan, Mingchao Sun, Kuan Yang, Jianfang Zhang, Yanghong Chen, Ye He, Wei Mei, Jiahao Shi, Xiangpo Yang, Yanqing Zhu, Zedong Chu, Xiaolong Wu, Mu Xu
arXiv:2608. 12854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics.
By Bing Zhan, Shuyao Shang, Jiahao Gu, Shuo Lu, Yuan Xu, Zhao Wang, Yida Wang, Xueyang Zhang, Kun Zhan, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
arXiv:2603. 18315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on manually engineered rewards or sparse collision signals, which fail to capture the rich contextual understanding required for safe driving and make unsafe exploration unavoidable in real-world settings.
By Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Zhengyang Wan, Yansong Qu, Junwei You, Sicong Jiang, Sikai Chen
The paper argues that current embodied vision‑language planning benchmarks favor linguistic next‑token prediction over physically grounded next‑state reasoning, leading models to rely on language priors rather than true causal dependencies. To address this, the authors introduce Causal‑Plan‑Bench, a diagnostic suite covering four causal dimensions, and Causal‑Plan‑1M, a million‑scale corpus of explicit causal reasoning traces extracted from egocentric videos. Extensive experiments show that existing models perform poorly on these tasks, while a new model trained with a tailored recipe—Causal Planner based on Qwen3‑VL‑8B—achieves significant gains, demonstrating the feasibility of physically grounded causal reasoning.
By Zheng Lu, Mingqi Gao, Qinlei Xie, Wanqi Zhong, Hanwen Cui, Zirui Song, Lijie Wang, Chong Luo, Bei Liu, Yiming Li
arXiv:2609.35823v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have made substantial progress in autonomous driving, but their success has primarily been studied in ego-centric scenes....
By Kang Yang, Shuai Liu, Hang Li, Yance Fang, Deying Li, Yongcai Wang