# XLM for Autonomous Driving Systems: A Comprehensive Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10484 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10484/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 101 of its 141 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2024.

## 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 101)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10904/) (2021)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11526/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Communication, Network, and Service Management: Application Insights, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19823/) (2024)
- [ReasonDrive: Efficient Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Vehicles with Reasoning-Enhanced Small Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10757/) (2025)
- [CleanMAP: Distilling Multimodal LLMs for Confidence-Driven Crowdsourced HD Map Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10738/) (2025)
- [A Novel MLLM-based Approach for Autonomous Driving in Different Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10603/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable proficiency in various information-processing tasks. These tasks span from extracting data and summarizing literature to generating content, predictive modeling, decision-making, and system controls. Moreover, Vision Large Models (VLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which represent the next generation of language models, a.k.a., XLMs, can combine and integrate many data modalities with the strength of language understanding, thus advancing several information-based systems, such as Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS). Indeed, by combining language communication with multimodal sensory inputs, e.g., panoramic images and LiDAR or radar data, accurate driving actions can be taken. In this context, we provide in this survey paper a comprehensive overview of the potential of XLMs towards achieving autonomous driving. Specifically, we review the relevant literature on ADS and XLMs, including their architectures, tools, and frameworks. Then, we detail the proposed approaches to deploy XLMs for autonomous driving solutions. Finally, we provide the related challenges to XLM deployment for ADS and point to future research directions aiming to enable XLM adoption in future ADS frameworks.