Lost in Fog: Sensor Perturbations Expose Reasoning Fragility in Driving VLAs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21446v1
• Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 17:34:02 GMT
• Title: Lost in Fog: Sensor Perturbations Expose Reasoning Fragility in Driving VLAs
• Abstract summary: We present a perturbation study of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) robustness in autonomous driving.<n>We find that reasoning consistency is a high-fidelity indicator of trajectory reliability.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Interpretable autonomous driving planners depend not only on generating explanations, but also on those explanations remaining reliable under real-world sensor degradation. In this paper we present a controlled perturbation study of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) robustness in autonomous driving, evaluating Alpamayo R1 (10B parameters) across 1,996 scenarios under eight sensor perturbations (Gaussian noise at four intensities, two lighting extremes, and two fog levels; ${\sim}18{,}000$ inference trials). We find that reasoning consistency is a high-fidelity indicator of trajectory reliability: when Chain-of-Causation (CoC) explanations change after perturbation, trajectory deviation spikes $5.3{\times}$ (21.8m vs 4.1m), with $r\!=\!0.99$ across attack types and $r_{pb}\!=\!0.53$ per-sample (Cohen's $d\!=\!1.12$). A controlled ablation provides evidence that enabling CoC generation is associated with improved trajectory accuracy (11.8% on average across conditions; $p < 0.0001$) under matched inference settings. Over the tested noise range ($σ\in \{10, 30, 50, 70\}$), degradation is approximately linear ($R^2\!=\!0.957$), while standard input preprocessing defenses provide only marginal relief. Together, these results establish CoC consistency as a quantitative proxy for planning safety and motivate reasoning-based runtime monitoring for safer VLA deployment.

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