DriveAction: A Benchmark for Exploring Human-like Driving Decisions in VLA Models
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05667v2
- Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2025 04:33:48 GMT
- Title: DriveAction: A Benchmark for Exploring Human-like Driving Decisions in VLA Models
- Abstract summary: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced autonomous driving, but existing benchmarks still lack scenario diversity, reliable action-level annotation, and evaluation protocols aligned with human preferences.<n>We introduce DriveAction, the first action-driven benchmark specifically designed for VLA models, comprising 16,185 QA pairs generated from 2,610 driving scenarios.<n>Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) require both vision and language guidance for accurate action prediction.
- Score: 5.1501039725906885
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced autonomous driving, but existing benchmarks still lack scenario diversity, reliable action-level annotation, and evaluation protocols aligned with human preferences. To address these limitations, we introduce DriveAction, the first action-driven benchmark specifically designed for VLA models, comprising 16,185 QA pairs generated from 2,610 driving scenarios. DriveAction leverages real-world driving data proactively collected by drivers of autonomous vehicles to ensure broad and representative scenario coverage, offers high-level discrete action labels collected directly from drivers' actual driving operations, and implements an action-rooted tree-structured evaluation framework that explicitly links vision, language, and action tasks, supporting both comprehensive and task-specific assessment. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) require both vision and language guidance for accurate action prediction: on average, accuracy drops by 3.3% without vision input, by 4.1% without language input, and by 8.0% without either. Our evaluation supports precise identification of model bottlenecks with robust and consistent results, thus providing new insights and a rigorous foundation for advancing human-like decisions in autonomous driving.
Related papers
- DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models [53.73898294218455]
DriveJudge is a driving evaluation agent that combines rule-grounded evaluation with Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning.<n>We introduce two benchmark tasks: Driving Quality Classification and Trajectory Preference Selection.<n>DriveJudge outperformsS for driving quality classification by 21.23 AUC, and the recent VLM-based DriveCritic for trajectory preference selection by 6.5%.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-06-15T23:39:36Z) - Counterfactual VLA: Self-Reflective Vision-Language-Action Model with Adaptive Reasoning [71.19675094463834]
This work introduces Counterfactual VLA, a self-reflective VLA framework that enables the model to reason about and revise its planned actions before execution.<n>CF-VLA first generates time-segmented meta-actions that summarize driving intent, and then performs counterfactual reasoning conditioned on both the meta-actions and the visual context.<n> Experiments on large-scale driving datasets show that CF-VLA improves trajectory accuracy by up to 17.6%, enhances safety metrics by 20.5%, and exhibits adaptive thinking.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-12-30T19:04:17Z) - Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future [125.92052530850425]
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks integrate perception with language-grounded decision making.<n>VLA frameworks offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies.<n>This work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-12-18T16:57:44Z) - From Human Intention to Action Prediction: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Intention-driven End-to-End Autonomous Driving [67.23302649816466]
Current autonomous driving systems operate at a level of intelligence akin to following simple steering commands.<n>We introduce Intention-Drive, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the ability to translate high-level human intent into safe and precise driving actions.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-12-13T11:59:51Z) - Reasoning-VLA: A Fast and General Vision-Language-Action Reasoning Model for Autonomous Driving [46.99350914451702]
Reasoning-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, superior generalization capability, and the excellent inference speed reported to date.<n>We consolidate eight publicly available autonomous driving datasets into a standardized, Chain-of-language reasoning-based, and easy-to-use data format for model training.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-11-25T04:40:11Z) - An Analytical Framework to Enhance Autonomous Vehicle Perception for Smart Cities [1.9923531555025622]
There is a need to develop a model that accurately perceives multiple objects on the road and predicts the driver's perception to control the car's movements.<n>This article proposes a novel utility-based analytical model that enables perception systems of AVs to understand the driving environment.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-15T07:34:22Z) - DriveCritic: Towards Context-Aware, Human-Aligned Evaluation for Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models [24.168614747778538]
We introduce DriveCritic, a novel framework featuring two key contributions.<n>The dataset is a curated collection of challenging scenarios where context is critical for correct judgment.<n>The DriveCritic model learns to adjudicate between trajectory pairs by integrating visual and symbolic context.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-15T03:00:38Z) - IntentionVLA: Generalizable and Efficient Embodied Intention Reasoning for Human-Robot Interaction [51.130510883952546]
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to couple perception with robotic control.<n>We propose textbfIntentionVLA, a VLA framework with a curriculum training paradigm and an efficient inference mechanism.<n>Our proposed method first leverages carefully designed reasoning data that combine intention inference, spatial grounding, and compact embodied reasoning.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-09T04:49:46Z) - A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving [26.407082158880204]
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) paradigms integrate visual perception, natural language understanding, and control within a single policy.<n>Researchers in autonomous driving are actively adapting these methods to the vehicle domain.<n>This survey offers the first comprehensive overview of VLA for Autonomous Driving.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-06-30T16:50:02Z) - AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning [42.409352964719204]
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise for end-to-end autonomous driving.<n>Current VLA models struggle with physically infeasible action outputs, complex model structures, or unnecessarily long reasoning.<n>We propose AutoVLA, a novel VLA model that unifies reasoning and action generation within a single autoregressive generation model.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-06-16T17:58:50Z) - ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving [49.07731497951963]
ReCogDrive is a novel Reinforced Cognitive framework for end-to-end autonomous driving.<n>We introduce a hierarchical data pipeline that mimics the sequential cognitive process of human drivers.<n>We then address the language-action mismatch by injecting the VLM's learned driving priors into a diffusion planner.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-06-09T03:14:04Z) - AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving [28.378854340190973]
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise for autonomous driving, yet their struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning.<n>We introduce AgentThink, a pioneering unified framework that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-21T09:27:43Z) - OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning [68.45848423501927]
We propose a holistic vision-language dataset that aligns agent models with 3D driving tasks through counterfactual reasoning.<n>Our approach enhances decision-making by evaluating potential scenarios and their outcomes, similar to human drivers considering alternative actions.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-04-06T03:54:21Z) - RAD: Retrieval-Augmented Decision-Making of Meta-Actions with Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving [10.984203470464687]
Vision-language models (VLMs) often suffer from limitations such as inadequate spatial perception and hallucination.<n>We propose a retrieval-augmented decision-making (RAD) framework to enhance VLMs' capabilities to reliably generate meta-actions in autonomous driving scenes.<n>We fine-tune VLMs on a dataset derived from the NuScenes dataset to enhance their spatial perception and bird's-eye view image comprehension capabilities.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-03-18T03:25:57Z) - DriveLMM-o1: A Step-by-Step Reasoning Dataset and Large Multimodal Model for Driving Scenario Understanding [76.3876070043663]
We propose DriveLMM-o1, a dataset and benchmark designed to advance step-wise visual reasoning for autonomous driving.<n>Our benchmark features over 18k VQA examples in the training set and more than 4k in the test set, covering diverse questions on perception, prediction, and planning.<n>Our model achieves a +7.49% gain in final answer accuracy, along with a 3.62% improvement in reasoning score over the previous best open-source model.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-03-13T17:59:01Z) - Minds on the Move: Decoding Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving with Cognitive Insights [18.92479778025183]
In driving scenarios, a vehicle's trajectory is determined by the decision-making process of human drivers.<n>Previous models fail to capture the true intentions of human drivers, leading to suboptimal performance in long-term trajectory prediction.<n>We introduce a Cognitive-Informed Transformer (CITF) that incorporates a cognitive concept, Perceived Safety, to interpret drivers' decision-making mechanisms.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-02-27T13:43:17Z) - Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectives [56.528835143531694]
We introduce DriveBench, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs)<n>Our findings reveal that VLMs often generate plausible responses derived from general knowledge or textual cues rather than true visual grounding.<n>We propose refined evaluation metrics that prioritize robust visual grounding and multi-modal understanding.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-01-07T18:59:55Z) - OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning [68.45848423501927]
We propose a holistic vision-language dataset that aligns agent models with 3D driving tasks through counterfactual reasoning.<n>Our approach enhances decision-making by evaluating potential scenarios and their outcomes, similar to human drivers considering alternative actions.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-05-02T17:59:24Z) - Automated Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models on Self-driving Corner Cases [102.05741859030951]
We propose CODA-LM, the first benchmark for the automatic evaluation of LVLMs for self-driving corner cases.<n>We show that using the text-only large language models as judges reveals even better alignment with human preferences than the LVLM judges.<n>Our CODA-VLM performs comparably with GPT-4V, even surpassing GPT-4V by +21.42% on the regional perception task.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-04-16T14:20:55Z) - VLP: Vision Language Planning for Autonomous Driving [52.640371249017335]
This paper presents a novel Vision-Language-Planning framework that exploits language models to bridge the gap between linguistic understanding and autonomous driving.
It achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end planning performance on the NuScenes dataset by achieving 35.9% and 60.5% reduction in terms of average L2 error and collision rates, respectively.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-01-10T23:00:40Z) - Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving [38.28159034562901]
Reason2Drive is a benchmark dataset with over 600K video-text pairs.
We characterize the autonomous driving process as a sequential combination of perception, prediction, and reasoning steps.
We introduce a novel aggregated evaluation metric to assess chain-based reasoning performance in autonomous systems.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-12-06T18:32:33Z) - DeepAccident: A Motion and Accident Prediction Benchmark for V2X
Autonomous Driving [76.29141888408265]
We propose a large-scale dataset containing diverse accident scenarios that frequently occur in real-world driving.
The proposed DeepAccident dataset includes 57K annotated frames and 285K annotated samples, approximately 7 times more than the large-scale nuScenes dataset.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-04-03T17:37:00Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.