mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving

256 papers2 this weekMedium confidence in this grouping: mostly one topic, with blurry edgesMedium confidence in this grouping: mostly one topic, with blurry edges · About

Keywords: driving, autonomous driving, autonomous, anomaly, anomaly detection

Key facts. Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving: 256 papers on arXiv since 2022 (data through 7 Oct 2026). 36 of its 256 mapped papers (14%) cite “Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving” (2023, arXiv 2312.03661). 34 of its 256 mapped papers (13%) cite “OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning” (2024, arXiv 2405.01533). 7 new papers 17 Sep–7 Oct.

What’s new

17 Sep – 7 Oct 2026

7 new papers, 17 Sep – 7 Oct; 2 this week.

  1. This week · 2
  2. Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving
  3. Not All Uncertainty Matters: Simulation-in-the-Loop Fast-Slow Reasoning for Decision-Critical Autonomous Driving System
  4. Earlier · 5
  5. From Scene Graphs to Answers: Selective Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning for Autonomous Driving also fits: Spatial and embodied reasoning
  6. CausalDriveBench: Evaluating Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving
  7. AnchorReasoning: A Visual Grounding and Causal Reasoning Dataset in Long-Tail Autonomous Driving Scenarios
  8. SlackDrive: Reclaiming Runtime Slack for Adaptive Driving Inference
  9. ProcessLight: Process Supervision for Large Language Model Based Traffic Signal Control also fits: Reasoning for agents, planning and code

Foundations

Most cited by papers here

  1. Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving2023cited by 36 here
  2. OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning2024cited by 34 here
  3. AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning2025cited by 27 here
  4. Drive Like a Human: Rethinking Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models2023cited by 21 here
  5. DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving2024cited by 21 here

Lineage

The papers this direction builds on, oldest first.

Each paper on the line cites the one before.

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 65 here
  2. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 15 here
  3. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 11 here
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 9 here
  5. 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Modelscited by 13 here
  6. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 34 here
  7. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 37 here
  8. 2025AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoningcited by 15 here
  9. 2025AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 27 here
  10. 2025Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tailcited by 16 here
14 more it builds on, not in this chain
  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 18 here
  2. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 17 here
  3. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 12 here
  4. 2023Drive Like a Human: Rethinking Autonomous Driving with Large Language Modelscited by 21 here
  5. 2023Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 36 here
  6. 2024DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Drivingcited by 21 here
  7. 2024OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoningcited by 34 here
  8. 2024Making Large Language Models Better Planners with Reasoning-Decision Alignmentcited by 13 here
  9. 2024LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Stepcited by 9 here
  10. 2024VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervisioncited by 18 here
  11. 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generationcited by 19 here
  12. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 18 here
  13. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 11 here
  14. 2025AdaThinkDrive: Adaptive Thinking via Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 10 here

The 24 most cited of 444.

Browse

30 of 256, ranked 6–35

  1. 6ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation202519
  2. 7VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision202418
  3. 8Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail202516
  4. 9AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning202515
  5. 10Making Large Language Models Better Planners with Reasoning-Decision Alignment202413
  6. 11AdaThinkDrive: Adaptive Thinking via Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving202510
  7. 12Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models20259
  8. 13AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving20259
  9. 14NuScenes-SpatialQA: A Spatial Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving20258
  10. 15VERDI: VLM-Embedded Reasoning for Autonomous Driving20258
All 30
  1. 16Follow the Rules: Reasoning for Video Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models20248
  2. 17WiseAD: Knowledge Augmented End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Model20248
  3. 18AnomalyR1: A GRPO-based End-to-end MLLM for Industrial Anomaly Detection20257
  4. 19WOMD-Reasoning: A Large-Scale Dataset for Interaction Reasoning in Driving20247
  5. 20PKRD-CoT: A Unified Chain-of-thought Prompting for Multi-Modal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving20247
  6. 21Receive, Reason, and React: Drive as You Say with Large Language Models in Autonomous Vehicles20237
  7. 22CoT-Drive: Efficient Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving with LLMs and Chain-of-Thought Prompting20256
  8. 23OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning20255
  9. 24DSDrive: Distilling Large Language Model for Lightweight End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Unified Reasoning and Planning20255
  10. 25Vad-R1: Towards Video Anomaly Reasoning via Perception-to-Cognition Chain-of-Thought20255
  11. 26Drive-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Planning in VLMs for Autonomous Driving with Reinforcement Learning20255
  12. 27Driving with Regulation: Trustworthy and Interpretable Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning20245
  13. 28FASIONAD : FAst and Slow FusION Thinking Systems for Human-Like Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Feedback20245
  14. 29LaST-VLA: Thinking in Latent Spatio-Temporal Space for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving20264
  15. 30LAD-Reasoner: Tiny Multimodal Models are Good Reasoners for Logical Anomaly Detection20254
  16. 31ReasonPlan: Unified Scene Prediction and Decision Reasoning for Closed-loop Autonomous Driving20254
  17. 32OmniAD: Detect and Understand Industrial Anomaly via Multimodal Reasoning20254
  18. 33ReAL-AD: Towards Human-Like Reasoning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving20254
  19. 34STRIDE-QA: Visual Question Answering Dataset for Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Urban Driving Scenes20254
  20. 35ColaVLA: Leveraging Cognitive Latent Reasoning for Hierarchical Parallel Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving20254