# RoboDriveVLM: A Novel Benchmark and Baseline towards Robust Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01300/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 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 21 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 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, 21 of 21)

- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09984/) (2020)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [TextBugger: Generating Adversarial Text Against Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05271/) (2018)
- [Can language models learn from explanations in context?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02329/) (2022)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [Stress Test Evaluation for Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00692/) (2018)
- [Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22313/) (2024)
- [Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04003/) (2025)
- [TTN: A Domain-Shift Aware Batch Normalization in Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05155/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models: Resources, Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07403/) (2024)
- [Tent: Fully Test-time Adaptation by Entropy Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10726/) (2020)
- [RoboBEV: Towards Robust Bird's Eye View Perception under Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06719/) (2023)
- [Are Large Language Models Really Robust to Word-Level Perturbations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11166/) (2023)
- [OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01533/) (2024)
- [Action Quality Assessment via Hierarchical Pose-guided Multi-stage Contrastive Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03674/) (2025)
- [Probing Multimodal LLMs as World Models for Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05956/) (2024)
- [Robust Disentangled Counterfactual Learning for Physical Audiovisual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12425/) (2025)
- [Fine-Grained Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21505/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [EvoDriveVLA: Evolving Driving VLA Models via Collaborative Perception-Planning Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09465/) (2026)
- [Bench2Drive-Robust: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving under Deployment Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18059/) (2026)
- [Lost in Fog: Sensor Perturbations Expose Reasoning Fragility in Driving VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21446/) (2026)
- [ObsDriveBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Understanding under Adverse Weather with Observability Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23537/) (2026)
- [GuardAD: Safeguarding Autonomous Driving MLLMs via Markovian Safety Logic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10386/) (2026)
- [When and How Severely: Scenario-Specific Safety Envelopes for Driving VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14238/) (2026)
- [Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01659/) (2026)
- [CoVLM-Bench: A Real-World Benchmark for Cooperative Driving Question Answering and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35823/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based end-to-end autonomous driving systems often leverage large language models to generate driving decisions directly based on their understanding of the current scene. However, such systems introduce multiple risks in real-world driving scenarios. To evaluate whether VLMs are truly viable for autonomous driving, we introduce RoboDriveBench, the first robustness benchmark focused on end-to-end trajectory prediction tasks. This benchmark systematically evaluates two critical categories of real-world challenges for VLM-based end-to-end autonomous driving systems through 11 simulated scenarios encompassing various corruption types, including 6 scenarios of sensor corruption caused by environmental variations, along with 5 cases of prompt corruption resulting from human intervention and data transmission failures. Each corruption type includes 250 unique driving scenarios and 5,689 frames, resulting in 64,559 total trajectory prediction cases per evaluation. To overcome these real-world challenges, we propose a novel VLM-based autonomous driving framework called RoboDriveVLM, which enhances robustness by mapping more multimodal data-e.g., lidar and radar-into a unified latent space. Furthermore, we introduce a new Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) method based on cross-modal knowledge distillation to improve the robustness of VLM-based autonomous driving systems. Through extensive experiments, our work highlights the limitations of current VLM-based end-to-end autonomous driving systems and provides a more reliable solution for real-world deployment. Source code and datasets will be released.