# DriveRX: A Vision-Language Reasoning Model for Cross-Task Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 24 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving](https://mlsanity.com/lr/chain-of-thought-reasoning-for-driving/)
- 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, 24 of 24)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [SimpleRL-Zoo: Investigating and Taming Zero Reinforcement Learning for Open Base Models in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18892/) (2025)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10615/) (2025)
- [GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01415/) (2023)
- [MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07365/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10430/) (2023)
- [ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19755/) (2025)
- [LlamaV-o1: Rethinking Step-by-step Visual Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06186/) (2025)
- [DriveTransformer: Unified Transformer for Scalable End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07656/) (2025)
- [Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04003/) (2025)
- [AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07608/) (2025)
- [VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14446/) (2024)
- [Align Anything: Training All-Modality Models to Follow Instructions with Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15838/) (2024)
- [DriveLMM-o1: A Step-by-Step Reasoning Dataset and Large Multimodal Model for Driving Scenario Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10621/) (2025)
- [VisuoThink: Empowering LVLM Reasoning with Multimodal Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09130/) (2025)
- [OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01533/) (2024)
- [Sce2DriveX: A Generalized MLLM Framework for Scene-to-Drive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14917/) (2025)

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

- [OJBench: A Competition Level Code Benchmark For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16395/) (2025)
- [MedReasoner: Reinforcement Learning Drives Reasoning Grounding from Clinical Thought to Pixel-Level Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08177/) (2025)
- [Bench2Drive-VL: Benchmarks for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01259/) (2026)
- [Cognitive Dual-Process Planning for Autonomous Driving with Structured Scene Knowledge and Verifiable Reasoning-Action Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19194/) (2026)
- [Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01659/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective autonomous driving hinges on robust reasoning across perception, prediction, planning, and behavior. However, conventional end-to-end models fail to generalize in complex scenarios due to the lack of structured reasoning. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) have been applied to driving tasks, they typically rely on isolated modules and static supervision, limiting their ability to support multi-stage decision-making. We present AutoDriveRL, a unified training framework that formulates autonomous driving as a structured reasoning process over four core tasks. Each task is independently modeled as a vision-language QA problem and optimized using task-specific reward models, enabling fine-grained reinforcement signals at different reasoning stages. Within this framework, we train DriveRX, a cross-task reasoning VLM designed for multi-stage decision-making. DriveRX achieves strong performance on the public benchmark, outperforming GPT-4o in behavior reasoning and demonstrating robustness under complex or corrupted driving conditions. DriveRX serves as a high-level semantic reasoning backbone, producing structured stage-wise reasoning chains that enhance decision consistency. These outputs also provide high-quality supervisory signals for annotation and downstream planning/control models. We release the AutoDriveRL framework and DriveRX to support future research.