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
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
VLA-Scope is a two‑stage framework designed to predict failures in vision‑language‑action models under distribution shifts. The first stage detects out‑of‑distribution inputs and classifies their shift categories using pooled image and language representations. For OOD inputs, the second stage updates failure risk during execution by combining shift category, action‑prefix features, and execution progress, achieving a ROC‑AUC of 0.8497 after 60 actions and outperforming baseline methods.
By Kaiwen Zhu, Dongfang Liu, Liangkai Liu
Large vision-language models can recognize the objects and attributes in a crowded scene yet assign an attribute to the wrong same-class instance. Generic visual-question-answering accuracy marks the...
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
DiaVLo is a diagnostic framework for vision‑language models (VLMs) that uses human curation and VLM generation to create specifications of desired and observed behaviours, revealing potential misalignments. It also offers causal estimates to pinpoint the most influential concepts driving VLM behaviour. Experiments on several open‑source VLMs under classification and generation tasks show that DiaVLo’s behaviour labels correlate with model performance and illuminate how VLMs perceive, organise, and prioritise concepts.
By Lorenzo Corti, Jie Yang
arXiv:2608. 16805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models can recognize the objects and attributes in a crowded scene yet assign an attribute to the wrong same-class instance.
By Yuanzhi Xu, Qian Gao, Jun Fan, Guohui Ding, Zhenyu Yang, Yuteng Xiao, Sixue Lin
arXiv:2607. 23537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving under adverse weather remains a critical challenge, yet existing vision-language benchmarks mainly evaluate under standard conditions, synthetic corruptions, or single modality.
By Qiao Yan, Yihan Wang, Zhenghao Xing, Jiaqi Xu, Pheng-Ann Heng
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: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:2605. 20306v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce WildRoadBench, a wild aerial road-damage grounding benchmark that couples direct visual grounding by vision-language models with autonomous research-and-engineering by LLM-driven agents on a single professionally annotated UAV corpus.
By Bingnan Liu, Chenhang Cui, Rui Huang, Jiani Luo, Zhirong Shen, Tinghao Wang, Xiande Huang, Lingbei Meng, Fei Shen, An Zhang
arXiv:2603. 18481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection remains a critical challenge in open-world learning, where models must adapt to evolving data distributions.
By Aditi Naiknaware, Salimeh Sekeh