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.
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:2607. 00283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous vehicles must safely navigate complex environments where planning-critical agents may be hidden from view.
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.
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.
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.
The paper studies how Bird's‑Eye‑View (BEV) maps predicted by Cross‑View Transformers (CVT) can be used directly as inputs to a Behavior‑Cloning (BC) driving policy in the CARLA simulator. It introduces a six‑channel BEV representation and a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) weighting scheme to focus learning on underrepresented maneuvers. Closed‑loop tests show that the KDE‑weighted model is the only predicted‑BEV agent to finish an episode without infractions, highlighting that global segmentation scores are poor proxies for driving performance and that prediction quality at critical geometries, especially the route channel, is key to reliable navigation.
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.
Qwen-Drive-1.0 is a vision‑language foundation model tailored for autonomous driving that builds on a pretrained VLM architecture. It incorporates a bird’s‑eye‑view perception head for 3D object detection, semantic occupancy prediction, and BEV map segmentation, and a Planning Expert that generates future ego trajectories from shared representations. Experiments show strong 3D perception, driving scene understanding, and competitive motion‑planning performance while largely preserving general vision‑language capabilities.
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.
arXiv:2610.02765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monitoring planned driving trajectories requires accurately estimating the collision likelihood with actors whose motion is itself impacted by the eg...
arXiv:2602. 18094v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant progress by being trained on massive-scale datasets, typically under the assumption that data are independent and identically distributed (IID).
arXiv:2608. 19807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can estimate physical quantities such as duration, speed, and acceleration from visual observations, but existing benchmarks primarily assess overall model performance against annotated ground truth.