# Reducing Text Bias in Synthetically Generated MCQAs for VLMs in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17677 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17677/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 9 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## 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, 9 of 9)

- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [DRAMA: Joint Risk Localization and Captioning in Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10767/) (2022)
- [Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04003/) (2025)
- [Automated Generation of Challenging Multiple-Choice Questions for Vision Language Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03225/) (2025)
- [Distractor Generation in Multiple-Choice Tasks: A Survey of Methods, Datasets, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01512/) (2024)
- [Can LVLMs Obtain a Driver's License? A Benchmark Towards Reliable AGI for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02914/) (2024)
- [Are Vision LLMs Road-Ready? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Safety-Critical Driving Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14526/) (2025)
- [Addressing Blind Guessing: Calibration of Selection Bias in Multiple-Choice Question Answering by Video Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14248/) (2024)
- [AutoDrive-QA: A Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Vision-Language Evaluation in Urban Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15778/) (2025)

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

- [Video-HopChain: Multi-Hop Questions and Confidence-Gated Exploration for Video Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25773/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) benchmarks are an established standard for measuring Vision Language Model (VLM) performance in driving tasks. However, we observe the known phenomenon that synthetically generated MCQAs are highly susceptible to hidden textual cues that allow models to exploit linguistic patterns rather than visual context. Our results show that a VLM fine-tuned on such data can achieve accuracy comparable to human-validated benchmarks even without visual input. Our proposed method reduces blind accuracy from +66.9% above random to +2.9%, eliminating the vast majority of exploitable textual shortcuts. By decoupling the correct answer from linguistic artifacts and employing a curriculum learning strategy, we force the model to rely on visual grounding, ensuring that performance accurately reflects perceptual understanding.