# GeoDrive-Bench: Benchmarking Region-Specific Multimodal Reasoning in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02774 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02774/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 21 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving](https://mlsanity.com/lr/chain-of-thought-reasoning-for-driving/)
- 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)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13757/) (2025)
- [Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19897/) (2026)
- [OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23463/) (2025)
- [FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17685/) (2025)
- [Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00088/) (2025)
- [LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14115/) (2023)
- [WOD-E2E: Waymo Open Dataset for End-to-End Driving in Challenging Long-tail Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26125/) (2025)
- [Impromptu VLA: Open Weights and Open Data for Driving Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23757/) (2025)
- [AdaThinkDrive: Adaptive Thinking via Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13769/) (2025)
- [SURDS: Benchmarking Spatial Understanding and Reasoning in Driving Scenarios with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13112/) (2024)
- [DriveAction: A Benchmark for Exploring Human-like Driving Decisions in VLA Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05667/) (2025)
- [CARScenes: Semantic VLM Dataset for Safe Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10701/) (2025)
- [DSBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating External and In-Cabin Risks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14592/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models (VLMs) for autonomous driving have shown promising performance, but their ability to handle region-specific traffic rules remains underexplored, raising uncertainties about their deployment across diverse global settings. We therefore introduce GeoDrive-Bench, a novel benchmark that enables the systematic investigation of VLMs' geo-culturally grounded driving reasoning. We curated 5,053 human-validated multiple-choice QA pairs across six countries covering diverse driving cultures. Specifically, we emphasize four driving tasks: perception, prediction, planning, and region reasoning. Each question requires models to infer the correct driving behavior from visual evidence and local traffic conventions without explicit country labels. Beyond evaluation, we further design a distillation algorithm that injects region-specific traffic-rule knowledge into the internal representations of VLMs, enabling models to better align visual scene understanding with local driving policies. Experiments on nine state-of-the-art VLMs show substantial performance variations across geo-driving cultures for each task, while our proposed baseline models exhibit improved geo-cultural reasoning across regions. These results suggest that current VLMs still lack robust region-aware driving intelligence and highlight GeoDrive-Bench as a diagnostic and training-oriented testbed for deployable autonomous driving foundation models.