SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Renz, Katrin, Chen, Long, Arani, Elahe, Sinavski, Oleg
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Renz, Katrin
Chen, Long
Arani, Elahe
Sinavski, Oleg
author_facet Renz, Katrin
Chen, Long
Arani, Elahe
Sinavski, Oleg
contents Integrating large language models (LLMs) into autonomous driving has attracted significant attention with the hope of improving generalization and explainability. However, existing methods often focus on either driving or vision-language understanding but achieving both high driving performance and extensive language understanding remains challenging. In addition, the dominant approach to tackle vision-language understanding is using visual question answering. However, for autonomous driving, this is only useful if it is aligned with the action space. Otherwise, the model's answers could be inconsistent with its behavior. Therefore, we propose a model that can handle three different tasks: (1) closed-loop driving, (2) vision-language understanding, and (3) language-action alignment. Our model SimLingo is based on a vision language model (VLM) and works using only camera, excluding expensive sensors like LiDAR. SimLingo obtains state-of-the-art performance on the widely used CARLA simulator on the Bench2Drive benchmark and is the winning entry at the CARLA challenge 2024. Additionally, we achieve strong results in a wide variety of language-related tasks while maintaining high driving performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09594
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment
Renz, Katrin
Chen, Long
Arani, Elahe
Sinavski, Oleg
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Integrating large language models (LLMs) into autonomous driving has attracted significant attention with the hope of improving generalization and explainability. However, existing methods often focus on either driving or vision-language understanding but achieving both high driving performance and extensive language understanding remains challenging. In addition, the dominant approach to tackle vision-language understanding is using visual question answering. However, for autonomous driving, this is only useful if it is aligned with the action space. Otherwise, the model's answers could be inconsistent with its behavior. Therefore, we propose a model that can handle three different tasks: (1) closed-loop driving, (2) vision-language understanding, and (3) language-action alignment. Our model SimLingo is based on a vision language model (VLM) and works using only camera, excluding expensive sensors like LiDAR. SimLingo obtains state-of-the-art performance on the widely used CARLA simulator on the Bench2Drive benchmark and is the winning entry at the CARLA challenge 2024. Additionally, we achieve strong results in a wide variety of language-related tasks while maintaining high driving performance.
title SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09594