arXiv AI By Zhijie Qiao, Haowei Li, Zhong Cao, Henry X. Liu

LightEMMA: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving

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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.

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