VLMs Guided Interpretable Decision Making for Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Hu, Xin, Jing, Taotao, Tian, Renran, Ding, Zhengming
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Hu, Xin
Jing, Taotao
Tian, Renran
Ding, Zhengming
author_facet Hu, Xin
Jing, Taotao
Tian, Renran
Ding, Zhengming
contents Recent advancements in autonomous driving (AD) have explored the use of vision-language models (VLMs) within visual question answering (VQA) frameworks for direct driving decision-making. However, these approaches often depend on handcrafted prompts and suffer from inconsistent performance, limiting their robustness and generalization in real-world scenarios. In this work, we evaluate state-of-the-art open-source VLMs on high-level decision-making tasks using ego-view visual inputs and identify critical limitations in their ability to deliver reliable, context-aware decisions. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new approach that shifts the role of VLMs from direct decision generators to semantic enhancers. Specifically, we leverage their strong general scene understanding to enrich existing vision-based benchmarks with structured, linguistically rich scene descriptions. Building on this enriched representation, we introduce a multi-modal interactive architecture that fuses visual and linguistic features for more accurate decision-making and interpretable textual explanations. Furthermore, we design a post-hoc refinement module that utilizes VLMs to enhance prediction reliability. Extensive experiments on two autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a promising direction for integrating VLMs into reliable and interpretable AD systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_13881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VLMs Guided Interpretable Decision Making for Autonomous Driving
Hu, Xin
Jing, Taotao
Tian, Renran
Ding, Zhengming
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advancements in autonomous driving (AD) have explored the use of vision-language models (VLMs) within visual question answering (VQA) frameworks for direct driving decision-making. However, these approaches often depend on handcrafted prompts and suffer from inconsistent performance, limiting their robustness and generalization in real-world scenarios. In this work, we evaluate state-of-the-art open-source VLMs on high-level decision-making tasks using ego-view visual inputs and identify critical limitations in their ability to deliver reliable, context-aware decisions. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new approach that shifts the role of VLMs from direct decision generators to semantic enhancers. Specifically, we leverage their strong general scene understanding to enrich existing vision-based benchmarks with structured, linguistically rich scene descriptions. Building on this enriched representation, we introduce a multi-modal interactive architecture that fuses visual and linguistic features for more accurate decision-making and interpretable textual explanations. Furthermore, we design a post-hoc refinement module that utilizes VLMs to enhance prediction reliability. Extensive experiments on two autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a promising direction for integrating VLMs into reliable and interpretable AD systems.
title VLMs Guided Interpretable Decision Making for Autonomous Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13881