mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Chain-of-Thought for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Prospects

arXiv 2505.20223 ↗First posted 26 May 2025cs.RO cs.LGcited by 12

On the map: LLM reasoning → Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid evolution of large language models in natural language processing has substantially elevated their semantic understanding and logical reasoning capabilities. Such proficiencies have been leveraged in autonomous driving systems, contributing to significant improvements in system performance. Models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, an advanced cognitive method that simulates human thinking processes, demonstrating remarkable reasoning capabilities in complex tasks. By structuring complex driving scenarios within a systematic reasoning framework, this approach has emerged as a prominent research focus in autonomous driving, substantially improving the system's ability to handle challenging cases. This paper investigates how CoT methods improve the reasoning abilities of autonomous driving models. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we present a systematic analysis of the motivations, methodologies, challenges, and future research directions of CoT in autonomous driving. Furthermore, we propose the insight of combining CoT with self-learning to facilitate self-evolution in driving systems. To ensure the relevance and timeliness of this study, we have compiled a dynamic repository of literature and open-source projects, diligently updated to incorporate forefront developments. The repository is publicly available at https://github.com/cuiyx1720/Awesome-CoT4AD.

Key facts. Cited by 12 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 78 of its 160 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

Builds on

78 of 160 references.

Closest ancestors · 14

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving21 May
  2. 2025DriveAgent: Multi-Agent Structured Reasoning with LLM and Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving4 May
  3. 2025PRIMEDrive-CoT: A Precognitive Chain-of-Thought Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Object Interaction in Driving Scene Scenario8 Apr
  4. 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation25 Mar
  5. 2025AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning10 Mar
  6. 2025CoT-Drive: Efficient Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving with LLMs and Chain-of-Thought Prompting10 Mar
  7. 2025CoT-VLM4Tar: Chain-of-Thought Guided Vision-Language Models for Traffic Anomaly Resolution3 Mar
  8. 2025Interact, Instruct to Improve: A LLM-Driven Parallel Actor-Reasoner Framework for Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Interactions1 Mar
  9. 2025LeapVAD: A Leap in Autonomous Driving via Cognitive Perception and Dual-Process Thinking14 Jan
  10. 2024AutoTrust: Benchmarking Trustworthiness in Large Vision Language Models for Autonomous Driving19 Dec
  11. 2024WiseAD: Knowledge Augmented End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Model13 Dec
  12. 2024PKRD-CoT: A Unified Chain-of-thought Prompting for Multi-Modal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving2 Dec
2 more
  1. 2024WOMD-Reasoning: A Large-Scale Dataset for Interaction Reasoning in Driving5 Jul
  2. 2024DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving25 Mar

Other references · 64

  1. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  2. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  3. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,708
  4. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  5. 2023Qwen Technical Reportcited by 3,344
  6. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  7. 2022Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 1,407
  8. 2024OpenAI o1 System Cardcited by 1,244
  9. 2023Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Modelscited by 872
  10. 2024DeepSeek-V3 Technical Reportcited by 811
  11. 2023Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 752
  12. 2024A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generationcited by 658
38 more
  1. 2022Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 596
  2. 2024DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 490
  3. 2025Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Modelscited by 384
  4. 2023GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPTcited by 347
  5. 2025From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Modelscited by 320
  6. 2025Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Lesscited by 297
  7. 2024MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Modelscited by 278
  8. 2024To CoT or not to CoT? Chain-of-thought helps mainly on math and symbolic reasoningcited by 263
  9. 2024From Explicit CoT to Implicit CoT: Learning to Internalize CoT Step by Stepcited by 235
  10. 2023DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Drivingcited by 233
  11. 2024EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 231
  12. 2022Towards Understanding Chain-of-Thought Prompting: An Empirical Study of What Matterscited by 222
  13. 2021One Million Scenes for Autonomous Driving: ONCE Datasetcited by 218
  14. 2023DiLu: A Knowledge-Driven Approach to Autonomous Driving with Large Language Modelscited by 207
  15. 2022On Second Thought, Let's Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoningcited by 194
  16. 2023LanguageMPC: Large Language Models as Decision Makers for Autonomous Drivingcited by 190
  17. 2022ROSCOE: A Suite of Metrics for Scoring Step-by-Step Reasoningcited by 177
  18. 2025OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Modelcited by 176
  19. 2022Language models show human-like content effects on reasoning taskscited by 173
  20. 2023A Language Agent for Autonomous Drivingcited by 164
  21. 2024Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 156
  22. 2019Talk2Car: Taking Control of Your Self-Driving Carcited by 142
  23. 2023LLM4Drive: A Survey of Large Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 136
  24. 2025A Survey of Efficient Reasoning for Large Reasoning Models: Language, Multimodality, and Beyondcited by 132
  25. 2025Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectivescited by 122
  26. 2024M3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 121
  27. 2025Towards System 2 Reasoning in LLMs: Learning How to Think With Meta Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 109
  28. 2023Towards Better Chain-of-Thought Prompting Strategies: A Surveycited by 62
  29. 2024A Survey for Foundation Models in Autonomous Drivingcited by 52
  30. 2024MedCoT: Medical Chain of Thought via Hierarchical Expertcited by 46
  31. 2024Continuously Learning, Adapting, and Improving: A Dual-Process Approach to Autonomous Drivingcited by 41
  32. 2024PlanAgent: A Multi-modal Large Language Agent for Closed-loop Vehicle Motion Planningcited by 38
  33. 2025Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applicationscited by 36
  34. 2025DriveLMM-o1: A Step-by-Step Reasoning Dataset and Large Multimodal Model for Driving Scenario Understandingcited by 36
  35. 2024On the Impact of Fine-Tuning on Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 32
  36. 2023Towards Knowledge-driven Autonomous Drivingcited by 29
  37. 2024SURDS: Benchmarking Spatial Understanding and Reasoning in Driving Scenarios with Vision Language Modelscited by 29
  38. 2025The Role of World Models in Shaping Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 29

50 most cited of 64 All 64 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 6.

12 papers.

  1. 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 72
  2. 2025AdaThinkDrive: Adaptive Thinking via Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 58
  3. 2025A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 23
  4. 2026Accelerating Structured Chain-of-Thought in Autonomous Vehiclescited by 6
  5. 2025Large Foundation Models for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 3
  6. 2025Foundation Models for Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving: A Review of Progress and Open Challengescited by 3
  7. 2026Judge, Then Drive: A Critic-Centric Vision Language Action Framework for Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
  8. 2026C-CoT: Counterfactual Chain-of-Thought with Vision-Language Models for Safe Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
  9. 2025GTR-Bench: Evaluating Geo-Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
  10. 2026SwarmDrive: Semantic V2V Coordination for Latency-Constrained Cooperative Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  11. 2026Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  12. 2026Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Drivingcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Latent Chain-of-Thought World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
  2. 2025CoT4AD: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Explicit Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Autonomous Driving
  3. 2026ThinkDrive: Chain-of-Thought Guided Progressive Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning for Autonomous Driving
  4. 2026A Survey of Reasoning in Autonomous Driving Systems: Open Challenges and Emerging Paradigms
  5. 2023Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2025AutoDrive-R2: Incentivizing Reasoning and Self-Reflection Capacity for VLA Model in Autonomous Driving
  7. 2024Making Large Language Models Better Planners with Reasoning-Decision Alignment
  8. 2026VLADriveBench: Evaluating CoT-Action Relationship in VLA for Autonomous Driving