# LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07488 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07488/

## Key facts

- Cited by 305 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Large language models for driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 47 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Large language models for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/large-language-models-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01415/) (2023)
- [Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13508/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 305)

- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [Visual CoT: Advancing Multi-Modal Language Models with a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16999/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23262/) (2024)
- [ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08052/) (2025)
- [ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19755/) (2025)
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025)
- [Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07087/) (2024)
- [OpenEMMA: Open-Source Multimodal Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15208/) (2024)
- [DriveMoE: Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language-Action Model in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16278/) (2025)
- [MoVA: Adapting Mixture of Vision Experts to Multimodal Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13046/) (2024)
- [CAD-MLLM: Unifying Multimodality-Conditioned CAD Generation With MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04954/) (2024)
- [StreamForest: Efficient Online Video Understanding with Persistent Event Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24871/) (2025)
- [CoVLA: Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10845/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24044/) (2025)
- [DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16996/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01454/) (2024)
- [StreamBridge: Turning Your Offline Video Large Language Model into a Proactive Streaming Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05467/) (2025)
- [Impromptu VLA: Open Weights and Open Data for Driving Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23757/) (2025)
- [CarLLaVA: Vision language models for camera-only closed-loop driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10165/) (2024)
- [HERMES: A Unified Self-Driving World Model for Simultaneous 3D Scene Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14729/) (2025)
- [Making Large Language Models Better Planners with Reasoning-Decision Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13890/) (2024)
- [Doe-1: Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Large World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09627/) (2024)
- [Pure Vision Language Action (VLA) Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19012/) (2025)
- [V2X-VLM: End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving Through Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09251/) (2024)
- [Distilling Multi-modal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09757/) (2025)
- [Continuously Learning, Adapting, and Improving: A Dual-Process Approach to Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15324/) (2024)
- [MC-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Context Visual Grounding in the Era of MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12332/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant recent progress in the field of autonomous driving, modern methods still struggle and can incur serious accidents when encountering long-tail unforeseen events and challenging urban scenarios. On the one hand, large language models (LLM) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities that approach "Artificial General Intelligence". On the other hand, previous autonomous driving methods tend to rely on limited-format inputs (e.g. sensor data and navigation waypoints), restricting the vehicle's ability to understand language information and interact with humans. To this end, this paper introduces LMDrive, a novel language-guided, end-to-end, closed-loop autonomous driving framework. LMDrive uniquely processes and integrates multi-modal sensor data with natural language instructions, enabling interaction with humans and navigation software in realistic instructional settings. To facilitate further research in language-based closed-loop autonomous driving, we also publicly release the corresponding dataset which includes approximately 64K instruction-following data clips, and the LangAuto benchmark that tests the system's ability to handle complex instructions and challenging driving scenarios. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted to demonstrate LMDrive's effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, we're the very first work to leverage LLMs for closed-loop end-to-end autonomous driving. Codes, models, and datasets can be found at https://github.com/opendilab/LMDrive