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.
By Zhijie Qiao, Haowei Li, Zhong Cao, Henry X. Liu
arXiv:2511. 14592v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show great promise for autonomous driving, but their suitability for safety-critical scenarios is largely unexplored, raising safety concerns.
By Xianhui Meng, Yuchen Zhang, Zhijian Huang, Zheng Lu, Ziling Ji, Yandan Lin, Yaoyao Yin, Hongyuan Zhang, Wei Zhou, Guangfeng Jiang, Li Zhang, Long Chen, Hangjun Ye, Jun Liu, Xiaoshuai Hao
arXiv:2510. 03314v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring the safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists, remains a critical challenge, as conventional infrastructure-based measures are often insufficient in dynamic urban environments.
By Shucheng Zhang, Yan Shi, Bingzhang Wang, Yuang Zhang, Muhammad Monjurul Karim, Kehua Chen, Chenxi Liu, Mehrdad Nasri, Yinhai Wang
arXiv:2601.08355v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in autonomous driving and embodied AI systems, where reliable perception is critical for sa...
By Guo Cheng, Huang Li
arXiv:2410. 08491v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated vehicles (AVs) promise to enhance transportation safety and efficiency.
By Saeed Rahmani, Sabine Rieder, Erwin de Gelder, Marcel Sonntag, Jorge Lorente Mallada, Sytze Kalisvaart, Vahid Hashemi, Bart van Arem, Simeon C. Calvert
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. 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
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.
By Manasa Mariam Mammen, Priyanka Mary Mammen, Zafer Kayatas, Stefan Wagner
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:2607. 16938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Kalpana Panda, Wesley Maia, Vinti Agarwal, Ross Greer
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: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