# Multi-Frame, Lightweight & Efficient Vision-Language Models for Question Answering in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19838 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19838/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 28 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)
- End-to-end autonomous driving / [VLMs for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/vlms-for-autonomous-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01415/) (2023)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [Driving with LLMs: Fusing Object-Level Vector Modality for Explainable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01957/) (2023)
- [Textual Explanations for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11546/) (2018)
- [LoftQ: LoRA-Fine-Tuning-Aware Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08659/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10936/) (2022)
- [Compressing Visual-linguistic Model via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02096/) (2021)
- [Distilling Large Vision-Language Model with Out-of-Distribution Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03135/) (2023)
- [Towards Explainable, Safe Autonomous Driving with Language Embeddings for Novelty Identification and Active Learning: Framework and Experimental Analysis with Real-World Data Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07320/) (2024)
- [The Why, When, and How to Use Active Learning in Large-Data-Driven 3D Object Detection for Safe Autonomous Driving: An Empirical Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16634/) (2024)
- [Robust Traffic Light Detection Using Salience-Sensitive Loss: Computational Framework and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04516/) (2023)
- [MIVC: Multiple Instance Visual Component for Visual-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17109/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [V2X-VLM: End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving Through Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09251/) (2024)
- [Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11526/) (2025)
- [AutoTrust: Benchmarking Trustworthiness in Large Vision Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15206/) (2024)
- [NuScenes-SpatialQA: A Spatial Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03164/) (2025)
- [NuPlanQA: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-View Driving Scene Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12772/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Models for Edge Networks: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07855/) (2025)
- [VRU-Accident: A Vision-Language Benchmark for Video Question Answering and Dense Captioning for Accident Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09815/) (2025)
- [RoadSocial: A Diverse VideoQA Dataset and Benchmark for Road Event Understanding from Social Video Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21459/) (2025)
- [SafeDriveRAG: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving with Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21585/) (2025)
- [MiniDrive: More Efficient Vision-Language Models with Multi-Level 2D Features as Text Tokens for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07267/) (2024)
- [DynRsl-VLM: Enhancing Autonomous Driving Perception with Dynamic Resolution Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11265/) (2025)
- [LLM4AD: Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving -- Concept, Review, Benchmark, Experiments, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15281/) (2024)
- [Right this way: Can VLMs Guide Us to See More to Answer Questions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00394/) (2024)
- [LaVida Drive: Vision-Text Interaction VLM for Autonomous Driving with Token Selection, Recovery and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12980/) (2024)
- [ReasonDrive: Efficient Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Vehicles with Reasoning-Enhanced Small Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10757/) (2025)
- [Bench2ADVLM: A Closed-Loop Benchmark for Vision-language Models in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02028/) (2025)
- [Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: Frontiers and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08854/) (2025)
- [VLM-Assisted Continual learning for Visual Question Answering in Self-Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00843/) (2025)
- [LightEMMA: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00284/) (2025)
- [PG-Attack: A Precision-Guided Adversarial Attack Framework Against Vision Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13111/) (2024)
- [XLM for Autonomous Driving Systems: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10484/) (2024)
- [TS-VLM: Text-Guided SoftSort Pooling for Vision-Language Models in Multi-View Driving Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12670/) (2025)
- [Automated Vehicles Should be Connected with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01059/) (2025)
- [Natural Language Instructions for Scene-Responsive Human-in-the-Loop Motion Planning in Autonomous Driving using Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04184/) (2026)
- [A Review of 3D Object Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18738/) (2025)
- [DriveSOTIF: Advancing Perception SOTIF Through Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07084/) (2025)
- [LMAD: Integrated End-to-End Vision-Language Model for Explainable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12404/) (2025)
- [RoadSceneVQA: Benchmarking Visual Question Answering in Roadside Perception Systems for Intelligent Transportation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18286/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to Prose: Advancing Multi-Modal Language Models for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05826/) (2024)
- [Interact, Instruct to Improve: A LLM-Driven Parallel Actor-Reasoner Framework for Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00502/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multi-Modal Language models (MMLMs) have become prominent in autonomous driving research, as these models can provide interpretable textual reasoning and responses for end-to-end autonomous driving safety tasks using traffic scene images and other data modalities. However, current approaches to these systems use expensive large language model (LLM) backbones and image encoders, making such systems unsuitable for real-time autonomous driving systems where tight memory constraints exist and fast inference time is necessary. To address these previous issues, we develop EM-VLM4AD, an efficient, lightweight, multi-frame vision language model which performs Visual Question Answering for autonomous driving. In comparison to previous approaches, EM-VLM4AD requires at least 10 times less memory and floating point operations, while also achieving higher CIDEr and ROUGE-L scores than the existing baseline on the DriveLM dataset. EM-VLM4AD also exhibits the ability to extract relevant information from traffic views related to prompts and can answer questions for various autonomous driving subtasks. We release our code to train and evaluate our model at https://github.com/akshaygopalkr/EM-VLM4AD.