# BLIP-FusePPO: A Vision-Language Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Lane Keeping in Autonomous Vehicles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22370 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22370/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 7 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 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 / [Reasoning VLA and VLM driving policies](https://mlsanity.com/driving/reasoning-vla-and-vlm-driving-policies/)
- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for autonomous driving and traffic](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-autonomous-driving-and-traffic/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning Applications to Autonomous Vehicle Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10773/) (2019)
- [Combining Planning and Deep Reinforcement Learning in Tactical Decision Making for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02680/) (2019)
- [Modeling Human Driving Behavior through Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06412/) (2020)
- [Code as Reward: Empowering Reinforcement Learning with VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04764/) (2024)
- [Vision-Cloud Data Fusion for ADAS: A Lane Change Prediction Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04042/) (2021)
- [Lane-Keeping Control of Autonomous Vehicles Through a Soft-Constrained Iterative LQR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16900/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose Bootstrapped Language-Image Pretraining-driven Fused State Representation in Proximal Policy Optimization (BLIP-FusePPO), a novel multimodal reinforcement learning (RL) framework for autonomous lane-keeping (LK), in which semantic embeddings generated by a vision-language model (VLM) are directly fused with geometric states, LiDAR observations, and Proportional-Integral-Derivative-based (PID) control feedback within the agent observation space. The proposed method lets the agent learn driving rules that are aware of their surroundings and easy to understand by combining high-level scene understanding from the VLM with low-level control and spatial signals. Our architecture brings together semantic, geometric, and control-aware representations to make policy learning more robust. A hybrid reward function that includes semantic alignment, LK accuracy, obstacle avoidance, and speed regulation helps learning to be more efficient and generalizable. Our method is different from the approaches that only use semantic models to shape rewards. Instead, it directly embeds semantic features into the state representation. This cuts down on expensive runtime inference and makes sure that semantic guidance is always available. The simulation results show that the proposed model is better at LK stability and adaptability than the best vision-based and multimodal RL baselines in a wide range of difficult driving situations. We make our code publicly available.