# Prompting Multi-Modal Tokens to Enhance End-to-End Autonomous Driving Imitation Learning with LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04869/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 52 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2024.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies](https://mlsanity.com/driving/reasoning-vla-and-vlm-driving-policies/)
- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Imitation and offline RL for driving](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/imitation-and-offline-rl-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02410/) (2017)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [Learning to Drive in a Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00412/) (2018)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [Fast and Furious: Real Time End-to-End 3D Detection, Tracking and Motion Forecasting with a Single Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12395/) (2020)
- [Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14024/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [LangCoop: Collaborative Driving with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13406/) (2025)
- [Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13219/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Autonomous Driving for Safety: A Human-Centric Approach with LLM-Enhanced RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04481/) (2024)
- [Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: Frontiers and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08854/) (2025)
- [Generative AI for RF Sensing in IoT systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07506/) (2024)
- [VR-Drive: Viewpoint-Robust End-to-End Driving with Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23205/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Large Vision Model in Street Scene Semantic Understanding through Leveraging Posterior Optimization Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01710/) (2025)
- [Simulating the Unseen: Crash Prediction Must Learn from What Did Not Happen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21743/) (2025)
- [MaskFuser: Masked Fusion of Joint Multi-Modal Tokenization for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07573/) (2024)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving Systems Through Synchronized Human Behavior Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10908/) (2024)
- [DynamicRouteGPT: A Real-Time Multi-Vehicle Dynamic Navigation Framework Based on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14185/) (2024)
- [Towards Physics-informed Spatial Intelligence with Human Priors: An Autonomous Driving Pilot Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21160/) (2025)
- [A Survey on End-to-End Autonomous Driving Training from the Perspectives of Data, Strategy, and Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the realm of reinforcement learning, particularly as planners, has garnered a significant degree of attention in recent scholarly literature. However, a substantial proportion of existing research predominantly focuses on planning models for robotics that transmute the outputs derived from perception models into linguistic forms, thus adopting a `pure-language' strategy. In this research, we propose a hybrid End-to-End learning framework for autonomous driving by combining basic driving imitation learning with LLMs based on multi-modality prompt tokens. Instead of simply converting perception results from the separated train model into pure language input, our novelty lies in two aspects. 1) The end-to-end integration of visual and LiDAR sensory input into learnable multi-modality tokens, thereby intrinsically alleviating description bias by separated pre-trained perception models. 2) Instead of directly letting LLMs drive, this paper explores a hybrid setting of letting LLMs help the driving model correct mistakes and complicated scenarios. The results of our experiments suggest that the proposed methodology can attain driving scores of 49.21%, coupled with an impressive route completion rate of 91.34% in the offline evaluation conducted via CARLA. These performance metrics are comparable to the most advanced driving models.