# X-Blocks: Linguistic Building Blocks of Natural Language Explanations for Automated Vehicles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [LLM-Blender: Ensembling Large Language Models with Pairwise Ranking and Generative Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02561/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06196/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (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)
- [Driving with LLMs: Fusing Object-Level Vector Modality for Explainable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01957/) (2023)
- [Textual Explanations for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11546/) (2018)
- [Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09902/) (2017)
- [LanguageMPC: Large Language Models as Decision Makers for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03026/) (2023)
- [A Language Agent for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10813/) (2023)
- [LLM4Drive: A Survey of Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01043/) (2023)
- [AI Transparency in the Age of LLMs: A Human-Centered Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01941/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Safety-Critical Driving Scenario Generation -- A Methodological Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02215/) (2022)
- [RAG-Driver: Generalisable Driving Explanations with Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning in Multi-Modal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10828/) (2024)
- [Temporal Action Segmentation: An Analysis of Modern Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10352/) (2022)
- [On the Road with GPT-4V(ision): Early Explorations of Visual-Language Model on Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05332/) (2023)
- [ADAPT: Action-aware Driving Caption Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00673/) (2023)
- [Receive, Reason, and React: Drive as You Say with Large Language Models in Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08034/) (2023)
- [Applying Large Language Models and Chain-of-Thought for Automatic Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03748/) (2023)
- [Goal-Driven Explainable Clustering via Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13749/) (2023)
- [Explainable AI for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Driving: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10086/) (2024)
- [Soft Self-Consistency Improves Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13212/) (2024)
- [Incremental Learning of Humanoid Robot Behavior from Natural Interaction and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04316/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NARRATE: A Multimodal Real-World Australian Driving Dataset for Human-Centred Explanations in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14767/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural language explanations play a critical role in establishing trust and acceptance of automated vehicles (AVs), yet existing approaches lack systematic frameworks for analysing how humans linguistically construct driving rationales across diverse scenarios. This paper introduces X-Blocks (eXplanation Blocks), a hierarchical analytical framework that identifies the linguistic building blocks of natural language explanations for AVs at three levels: context, syntax, and lexicon. At the context level, we propose RACE (Reasoning-Aligned Classification of Explanations), a multi-LLM ensemble framework that combines Chain-of-Thought reasoning with self-consistency mechanisms to robustly classify explanations into 32 scenario-aware categories. Applied to human-authored explanations from the Berkeley DeepDrive-X dataset, RACE achieves 91.45 percent accuracy and a Cohens kappa of 0.91 against cases with human annotator agreement, indicating near-human reliability for context classification. At the lexical level, log-odds analysis with informative Dirichlet priors reveals context-specific vocabulary patterns that distinguish driving scenarios. At the syntactic level, dependency parsing and template extraction show that explanations draw from a limited repertoire of reusable grammar families, with systematic variation in predicate types and causal constructions across contexts. The X-Blocks framework is dataset-agnostic and task-independent, offering broad applicability to other automated driving datasets and safety-critical domains. Overall, our findings provide evidence-based linguistic design principles for generating scenario-aware explanations that support transparency, user trust, and cognitive accessibility in automated driving systems.