# WiseAD: Knowledge Augmented End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09951 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09951/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 15 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving](https://mlsanity.com/lr/chain-of-thought-reasoning-for-driving/)
- 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 / [Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies](https://mlsanity.com/driving/reasoning-vla-and-vlm-driving-policies/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [MobileVLM V2: Faster and Stronger Baseline for Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03766/) (2024)
- [LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14115/) (2023)
- [Talk2Car: Taking Control of Your Self-Driving Car](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10838/) (2019)
- [MobileVLM : A Fast, Strong and Open Vision Language Assistant for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16886/) (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)
- [Automated Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models on Self-driving Corner Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10595/) (2024)
- [CoVLA: Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10845/) (2024)
- [Embodied Understanding of Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04593/) (2024)
- [Towards Knowledge-driven Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04316/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08052/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16760/) (2025)
- [UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02190/) (2026)
- [DSDrive: Distilling Large Language Model for Lightweight End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Unified Reasoning and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05360/) (2025)
- [DVGT-2: Vision-Geometry-Action Model for Autonomous Driving at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00813/) (2026)
- [VDT-Auto: End-to-end Autonomous Driving with VLM-Guided Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20108/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Thought for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20223/) (2025)
- [Poutine: Vision-Language-Trajectory Pre-Training and Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Enable Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11234/) (2025)
- [OpenREAD: Reinforced Open-Ended Reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with LLM-as-Critic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01830/) (2025)
- [Extending Large Vision-Language Model for Diverse Interactive Tasks in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08725/) (2025)
- [WAM-Diff: A Masked Diffusion VLA Framework with MoE and Online Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11872/) (2025)
- [VLM-SAFE: Vision-Language Model-Guided Safety-Aware Reinforcement Learning with World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16377/) (2025)
- [AutoMoT: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model with Asynchronous Mixture-of-Transformers for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14851/) (2026)
- [V3LMA: Visual 3D-enhanced Language Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00156/) (2025)
- [Interact, Instruct to Improve: A LLM-Driven Parallel Actor-Reasoner Framework for Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00502/) (2025)
- [iFinder: Structured Zero-Shot Vision-Based LLM Grounding for Dash-Cam Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19552/) (2025)
- [VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12396/) (2026)
- [Towards Safe Mobility: A Unified Transportation Foundation Model enabled by Open-Ended Vision-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22260/) (2026)
- [GeoWorldAD: Geometry World Action Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17521/) (2026)
- [From Representational Complementarity to Dual Systems: Synergizing VLM and Vision-Only Backbones for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10719/) (2026)
- [The Blind Spot of Adaptation: Quantifying and Mitigating Forgetting in Fine-tuned Driving Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04857/) (2026)
- [VL-DPO: Vision-Language-Guided Finetuning for Preference-Aligned Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20082/) (2026)
- [Deferred Exposure of Future Trajectories for Verifiable Reasoning in Autonomous Driving VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01755/) (2026)
- [What to Test Next: Interpretable Coverage Gap Discovery in Driving VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01624/) (2026)
- [Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01659/) (2026)
- [CausalDriveBench: Evaluating Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32157/) (2026)
- [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 emergence of general human knowledge and impressive logical reasoning capacity in rapidly progressed vision-language models (VLMs) have driven increasing interest in applying VLMs to high-level autonomous driving tasks, such as scene understanding and decision-making. However, an in-depth study on the relationship between knowledge proficiency, especially essential driving expertise, and closed-loop autonomous driving performance requires further exploration. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the depth and breadth of fundamental driving knowledge on closed-loop trajectory planning and introduce WiseAD, a specialized VLM tailored for end-to-end autonomous driving capable of driving reasoning, action justification, object recognition, risk analysis, driving suggestions, and trajectory planning across diverse scenarios. We employ joint training on driving knowledge and planning datasets, enabling the model to perform knowledge-aligned trajectory planning accordingly. Extensive experiments indicate that as the diversity of driving knowledge extends, critical accidents are notably reduced, contributing 11.9% and 12.4% improvements in the driving score and route completion on the Carla closed-loop evaluations, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, WiseAD also demonstrates remarkable performance in knowledge evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets.