COVLM-RL: Critical Object-Oriented Reasoning for Autonomous Driving Using VLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09349v1
• Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2025 06:18:16 GMT
• Title: COVLM-RL: Critical Object-Oriented Reasoning for Autonomous Driving Using VLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning
• Abstract summary: We propose COVLM-RL, a novel end-to-end driving framework that integrates Critical Object-oriented (CO) reasoning with reinforcement learning (RL)<n>Experiments conducted in the CARLA simulator demonstrate that COVLM-RL significantly improves the success rate by 30% in trained driving environments.
• Score: 55.83415345423854
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving frameworks face persistent challenges in generalization, training efficiency, and interpretability. While recent methods leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through supervised learning on large-scale datasets to improve reasoning, they often lack robustness in novel scenarios. Conversely, reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches enhance adaptability but remain data-inefficient and lack transparent decision-making. % contribution To address these limitations, we propose COVLM-RL, a novel end-to-end driving framework that integrates Critical Object-oriented (CO) reasoning with VLM-guided RL. Specifically, we design a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting strategy that enables the VLM to reason over critical traffic elements and generate high-level semantic decisions, effectively transforming multi-view visual inputs into structured semantic decision priors. These priors reduce the input dimensionality and inject task-relevant knowledge into the RL loop, accelerating training and improving policy interpretability. However, bridging high-level semantic guidance with continuous low-level control remains non-trivial. To this end, we introduce a consistency loss that encourages alignment between the VLM's semantic plans and the RL agent's control outputs, enhancing interpretability and training stability. Experiments conducted in the CARLA simulator demonstrate that COVLM-RL significantly improves the success rate by 30\% in trained driving environments and by 50\% in previously unseen environments, highlighting its strong generalization capability.

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