arXiv AI

DriveMind: Mind-Evolving Belief Tracking for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving

DriveMind is a multimodal large language model (MLLM) framework for autonomous driving that maintains multiple hypotheses about a traffic scene and updates their weights as new frames arrive, inspired by particle filtering. By propagating each hypothesis through a vision-language model, scoring against current observations, and resampling to preserve diversity, DriveMind improves driving performance on the Bench2Drive benchmark, raising the Driving Score from 68.50 to 81.37 and the Success Rate from 41.36% to 54.09%. The approach yields the largest gains in ambiguous scenarios such as unsignalized intersections and oncoming-traffic interactions, and also enhances fine‑grained interactive driving tasks like merging, emergency braking, and give‑way.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Model

arXiv:2512. 05277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.

By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
arXiv AI
Jun 4

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding for Agentic Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2512. 05277v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.

By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 27

AdaThinkDrive: Adaptive Thinking via Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2509.13769v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While reasoning technology like Chain of Thought (CoT) has been widely adopted in Vision Language Action (VLA) models, it demonstrates promising ca...

By Yuechen Luo, Fang Li, Shaoqing Xu, Zhiyi Lai, Lei Yang, Qimao Chen, Ziang Luo, Zixun Xie, Shengyin Jiang, Jiaxin Liu, Long Chen, Bing Wang, Ken Deng, Zhi-xin Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 17

DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

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.

By Xinglong Sun, Kevin Xie, Jenny Schmalfuss, Despoina Paschalidou, Xiuming Zhang, Sanja Fidler, Kashyap Chitta, Jose M. Alvarez
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 1

Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory

arXiv:2609.38641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have recently emerged as one of the prevailing solutions for autonomous driving, as they can utilize kno...

By Kai Yan, Xiangyu Chen, Yulong Cao, Alex Naumann, Peter Karkus, Yan Wang, Jef Packer, Alex Schwing, Yuxiong Wang, Boris Ivanovic, Wenjie Luo, Marco Pavone
arXiv AI
Oct 19

STRIDE: Evaluating Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Driving Edge Cases

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 AI
Oct 9

More Than Meets the Eye? Uncovering the Reasoning-Planning Disconnect in Training Vision-Language Driving Models

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 AI
Jul 3

DriveVLM-RL: Neuroscience-Inspired Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language Models for Safe and Deployable Autonomous Driving

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Less Language, More Latents: Annotation-Efficient VLAs for Driving

The paper introduces Latent Action Driving Annotations (LADA), a three‑stage pipeline that converts large amounts of unlabelled observation‑trajectory data into a language‑conditioned driving model. First, a latent action model with a vector‑quantised bottleneck learns a compact codebook of vehicle intents. Then, a small set of language‑annotated examples trains a vision‑language translator to map observations and instructions into this codebook, and finally a VLA is trained on observation‑latent‑action pairs across the full corpus. Using less than 5% of language annotations, LADA attains a Driving Score of 87.98 and a Success Rate of 70.46% on Bench2Drive, matching or surpassing fully supervised baselines.

By Alexey Zakharov, Kemal Oksuz, Puneet K. Dokania