arXiv Computer Vision By Katharina Winter, Stefan Englmeier, Fabian B. Flohr

Speed in the Blind Spot: An Interpretability Analysis of Dynamic Perception in VLMs for Autonomous Driving

Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →

Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) used in autonomous driving are evaluated on their ability to understand velocity through three tasks: surrounding‑agent speed, current ego speed, and short‑horizon future ego‑speed. Experiments on nuScenes show that while current ego speed can be accessed internally, verbal outputs are poor and surrounding‑agent speed is weakly encoded; temporal cues and frame order are largely ignored. Specialized driving models (Alpamayo‑1.5) improve latent speed representations but still leave gaps between internal knowledge and verbal readout, indicating that good planning outputs do not guarantee reliable dynamic state recovery.

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