# BeLLA: End-to-End Birds Eye View Large Language Assistant for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06096/

## 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 31 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 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, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [Phi-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08905/) (2024)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01415/) (2023)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [NuScenes-QA: A Multi-modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14836/) (2023)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [LanguageMPC: Large Language Models as Decision Makers for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03026/) (2023)
- [LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14115/) (2023)
- [LLM4Drive: A Survey of Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01043/) (2023)
- [Vision-Centric BEV Perception: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02797/) (2022)
- [Language Prompt for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04379/) (2023)
- [LiDAR-LLM: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for 3D LiDAR Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14074/) (2023)
- [Talk2BEV: Language-enhanced Bird's-eye View Maps for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02251/) (2023)
- [VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14446/) (2024)
- [Holistic Autonomous Driving Understanding by Bird's-Eye-View Injected Multi-Modal Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00988/) (2024)
- [Embodied Understanding of Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04593/) (2024)
- [Multi-Frame, Lightweight & Efficient Vision-Language Models for Question Answering in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19838/) (2024)
- [BEV-Seg: Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation Using Geometry and Semantic Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11436/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid development of Vision-Language models (VLMs) and Multimodal Language Models (MLLMs) in autonomous driving research has significantly reshaped the landscape by enabling richer scene understanding, context-aware reasoning, and more interpretable decision-making. However, a lot of existing work often relies on either single-view encoders that fail to exploit the spatial structure of multi-camera systems or operate on aggregated multi-view features, which lack a unified spatial representation, making it more challenging to reason about ego-centric directions, object relations, and the wider context. We thus present BeLLA, an end-to-end architecture that connects unified 360deg BEV representations with a large language model for question answering in autonomous driving. We primarily evaluate our work using two benchmarks - NuScenes-QA and DriveLM, where BeLLA consistently outperforms existing approaches on questions that require greater spatial reasoning, such as those involving relative object positioning and behavioral understanding of nearby objects, achieving up to +9.3% absolute improvement in certain tasks. In other categories, BeLLA performs competitively, demonstrating the capability of handling a diverse range of questions.