Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the
  Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectives
Authors: name: Shaoyuan Xie; name: Lingdong Kong; name: Yuhao Dong; name: Chonghao Sima; name: Wenwei Zhang; name: Qi Alfred Chen; name: Ziwei Liu; name: Liang Pan
Published: 2025-01-07 18:59:55

Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have sparked interest in
their use for autonomous driving, particularly in generating interpretable
driving decisions through natural language. However, the assumption that VLMs
inherently provide visually grounded, reliable, and interpretable explanations
for driving remains largely unexamined. To address this gap, we introduce
DriveBench, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate VLM reliability across 17
settings (clean, corrupted, and text-only inputs), encompassing 19,200 frames,
20,498 question-answer pairs, three question types, four mainstream driving
tasks, and a total of 12 popular VLMs. Our findings reveal that VLMs often
generate plausible responses derived from general knowledge or textual cues
rather than true visual grounding, especially under degraded or missing visual
inputs. This behavior, concealed by dataset imbalances and insufficient
evaluation metrics, poses significant risks in safety-critical scenarios like
autonomous driving. We further observe that VLMs struggle with multi-modal
reasoning and display heightened sensitivity to input corruptions, leading to
inconsistencies in performance. To address these challenges, we propose refined
evaluation metrics that prioritize robust visual grounding and multi-modal
understanding. Additionally, we highlight the potential of leveraging VLMs'
awareness of corruptions to enhance their reliability, offering a roadmap for
developing more trustworthy and interpretable decision-making systems in
real-world autonomous driving contexts. The benchmark toolkit is publicly
accessible.