# X-Driver: Explainable Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 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 17 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2025.

## 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, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07488/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT for Robotics: Design Principles and Model Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17582/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16996/) (2024)
- [CoT-Drive: Efficient Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving with LLMs and Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07234/) (2025)
- [Sce2DriveX: A Generalized MLLM Framework for Scene-to-Drive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14917/) (2025)
- [PKRD-CoT: A Unified Chain-of-thought Prompting for Multi-Modal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02025/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V as Traffic Assistant: An In-depth Look at Vision Language Model on Complex Traffic Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02205/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [SpaceDrive: Infusing Spatial Awareness into VLM-based Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10719/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Thought for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20223/) (2025)
- [Bench2Drive-VL: Benchmarks for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01259/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Multi-sensor Fusion Perception for Embodied AI: Background, Methods, Challenges and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19769/) (2025)
- [SparseOccVLA: Bridging Occupancy and Vision-Language Models via Sparse Queries for Unified 4D Scene Understanding and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06474/) (2026)
- [Distill to Think, Foresee to Act: Cognitive-Physical Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21139/) (2026)
- [An LLM-Explainable DRL Framework for Passenger-Directed Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20640/) (2026)
- [OmniSpace: Efficient Geometry Awareness for Autonomous Vehicles MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22617/) (2026)
- [Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01659/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end autonomous driving has advanced significantly, offering benefits such as system simplicity and stronger driving performance in both open-loop and closed-loop settings than conventional pipelines. However, existing frameworks still suffer from low success rates in closed-loop evaluations, highlighting their limitations in real-world deployment. In this paper, we introduce X-Driver, a unified multi-modal large language models(MLLMs) framework designed for closed-loop autonomous driving, leveraging Chain-of-Thought(CoT) and autoregressive modeling to enhance perception and decision-making. We validate X-Driver across multiple autonomous driving tasks using public benchmarks in CARLA simulation environment, including Bench2Drive[6]. Our experimental results demonstrate superior closed-loop performance, surpassing the current state-of-the-art(SOTA) while improving the interpretability of driving decisions. These findings underscore the importance of structured reasoning in end-to-end driving and establish X-Driver as a strong baseline for future research in closed-loop autonomous driving.