DriveRX: A Vision-Language Reasoning Model for Cross-Task Autonomous Driving

Muxi Diao, Lele Yang, Hongbo Yin, Zhexu Wang, Yejie Wang, Daxin Tian, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma

Keywords: Visual Reasoning, Vision Language Model, Autonomous Driving

Abstract:

Effective autonomous driving hinges on robust reasoning across perception, prediction, planning, and behavior. However, conventional end-to-end models fail to generalize in complex scenarios due to the lack of structured reasoning. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) have been applied to driving tasks, they typically rely on isolated modules and static supervision, limiting their ability to support multi-stage decision-making. We present AutoDriveRL, a unified training framework that formulates autonomous driving as a structured reasoning process over four core tasks. Each task is independently modeled as a vision-language QA problem and optimized using task-specific reward models, enabling fine-grained reinforcement signals at different reasoning stages. Within this framework, we train DriveRX, a cross-task reasoning VLM designed for multi-stage decision-making. DriveRX achieves strong performance on the public benchmark, outperforming GPT-4o in behavior reasoning and demonstrating robustness under complex or corrupted driving conditions. DriveRX serves as a high-level semantic reasoning backbone, producing structured stage-wise reasoning chains that enhance decision consistency. These outputs also provide high-quality supervisory signals for annotation and downstream planning/control models.
We will release the AutoDriveRL framework and DriveRX to support future research.

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

Submission Number: 12409