# Explanations in Autonomous Driving: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05154 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05154/

## Key facts

- Cited by 81 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 231 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6806/) (2014)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [Attention is not not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04626/) (2019)
- [Towards Faithfully Interpretable NLP Systems: How should we define and evaluate faithfulness?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03685/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Towards Medical XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07374/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [Unmasking Clever Hans Predictors and Assessing What Machines Really Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10178/) (2019)
- [Metrics for Explainable AI: Challenges and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04608/) (2018)
- [Manipulating and Measuring Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07810/) (2018)
- [Opportunities and Challenges in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11371/) (2020)
- [One Thousand and One Hours: Self-driving Motion Prediction Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14480/) (2020)
- [Textual Explanations for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11546/) (2018)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Understanding, Visualizing and Interpreting Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08296/) (2017)
- [Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05519/) (2017)
- [Smooth Grad-CAM++: An Enhanced Inference Level Visualization Technique for Deep Convolutional Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01224/) (2019)
- [Interpretable Learning for Self-Driving Cars by Visualizing Causal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10631/) (2017)
- [Toward Driving Scene Understanding: A Dataset for Learning Driver Behavior and Causal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02307/) (2018)
- ['It's Reducing a Human Being to a Percentage'; Perceptions of Justice in Algorithmic Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10408/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [Driving with LLMs: Fusing Object-Level Vector Modality for Explainable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01957/) (2023)
- [RAG-Driver: Generalisable Driving Explanations with Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning in Multi-Modal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10828/) (2024)
- [Milestones in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Vehicles: Survey of Surveys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17220/) (2023)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Overview and Field Guide for Future Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11561/) (2021)
- ["Help Me Help the AI": Understanding How Explainability Can Support Human-AI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03735/) (2022)
- [Drive Anywhere: Generalizable End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Multi-modal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17642/) (2023)
- [Explainable AI for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Driving: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10086/) (2024)
- [ProtoVAE: A Trustworthy Self-Explainable Prototypical Variational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08151/) (2022)
- [SAFARI: Versatile and Efficient Evaluations for Robustness of Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09418/) (2022)
- [Milestones in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Vehicles Part I: Control, Computing System Design, Communication, HD Map, Testing, and Human Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11239/) (2023)
- [Prompt-based Learning for Unpaired Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13125/) (2022)
- [Probing Multimodal LLMs as World Models for Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05956/) (2024)
- [Research on Autonomous Driving Decision-making Strategies based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03084/) (2024)
- [Explaining Autonomous Driving Actions with Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10408/) (2023)
- [SimpleLLM4AD: An End-to-End Vision-Language Model with Graph Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21293/) (2024)
- [Fairness and Bias in Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03444/) (2022)
- [Why Should I Choose You? AutoXAI: A Framework for Selecting and Tuning eXplainable AI Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02795/) (2022)
- [Interactive Autonomous Navigation with Internal State Inference and Interactivity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16091/) (2023)
- [Explainable Action Prediction through Self-Supervision on Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03477/) (2023)
- [Safety Implications of Explainable Artificial Intelligence in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12176/) (2024)
- [Logic-RAG: Augmenting Large Multimodal Models with Visual-Spatial Knowledge for Road Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12663/) (2025)
- [Textual Explanations for Automated Commentary Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08178/) (2023)
- [Human Attention-Guided Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Computer Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03601/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Self-Explainable Models Without Re-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07822/) (2023)
- [Advancing Explainable Autonomous Vehicle Systems: A Comprehensive Review and Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00019/) (2024)
- [Exploring Latent Pathways: Enhancing the Interpretability of Autonomous Driving with a Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01750/) (2024)
- [Empowering CAM-Based Methods with Capability to Generate Fine-Grained and High-Faithfulness Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09171/) (2023)
- [DRIVE: Dependable Robust Interpretable Visionary Ensemble Framework in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10330/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Integrating BEV Perception with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17659/) (2024)
- [CAMs as Shapley Value-based Explainers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06261/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The automotive industry has witnessed an increasing level of development in the past decades; from manufacturing manually operated vehicles to manufacturing vehicles with a high level of automation. With the recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), automotive companies now employ blackbox AI models to enable vehicles to perceive their environments and make driving decisions with little or no input from a human. With the hope to deploy autonomous vehicles (AV) on a commercial scale, the acceptance of AV by society becomes paramount and may largely depend on their degree of transparency, trustworthiness, and compliance with regulations. The assessment of the compliance of AVs to these acceptance requirements can be facilitated through the provision of explanations for AVs' behaviour. Explainability is therefore seen as an important requirement for AVs. AVs should be able to explain what they have 'seen', done, and might do in environments in which they operate. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the existing body of work around explainable autonomous driving. First, we open with a motivation for explanations by highlighting and emphasising the importance of transparency, accountability, and trust in AVs; and examining existing regulations and standards related to AVs. Second, we identify and categorise the different stakeholders involved in the development, use, and regulation of AVs and elicit their explanation requirements for AV. Third, we provide a rigorous review of previous work on explanations for the different AV operations (i.e., perception, localisation, planning, control, and system management). Finally, we identify pertinent challenges and provide recommendations, such as a conceptual framework for AV explainability. This survey aims to provide the fundamental knowledge required of researchers who are interested in explainability in AVs.