# Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving

Area: [LLM reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/lr/chain-of-thought-reasoning-for-driving/

## Key facts

- Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving: 258 papers on arXiv since 2022 (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- 36 of its 258 mapped papers (14%) cite “Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving” (2023, arXiv 2312.03661).
- 34 of its 258 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–14 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03661/) (2023), cited by 36 papers here
- [OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01533/) (2024), cited by 34 papers here
- [AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13757/) (2025), cited by 27 papers here
- [Drive Like a Human: Rethinking Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07162/) (2023), cited by 21 papers here
- [DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16996/) (2024), cited by 21 papers here
- [ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19755/) (2025), cited by 19 papers here
- [VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14446/) (2024), cited by 18 papers here
- [Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00088/) (2025), cited by 16 papers here
- [AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07608/) (2025), cited by 15 papers here
- [Making Large Language Models Better Planners with Reasoning-Decision Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13890/) (2024), cited by 13 papers here

## New (17 Sep–14 Oct)

- [Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10390/) (2026-10-07)
- [Not All Uncertainty Matters: Simulation-in-the-Loop Fast-Slow Reasoning for Decision-Critical Autonomous Driving System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09520/) (2026-10-07)
- [From Scene Graphs to Answers: Selective Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32645/) (2026-09-26)
- [CausalDriveBench: Evaluating Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32157/) (2026-09-26)
- [AnchorReasoning: A Visual Grounding and Causal Reasoning Dataset in Long-Tail Autonomous Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28366/) (2026-09-23)
- [SlackDrive: Reclaiming Runtime Slack for Adaptive Driving Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28064/) (2026-09-23)
- [ProcessLight: Process Supervision for Large Language Model Based Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22746/) (2026-09-19)