mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

VLADriveBench: Evaluating CoT-Action Relationship in VLA for Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2606.12706 ↗First posted 10 Jun 2026cs.CVcited by 1

On the map: LLM reasoning → Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving

also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning alongside driving trajectories, but existing benchmarks evaluate only trajectory quality and do not assess whether the CoT is relevant, consistent, or causally connected to the driving action. We introduce VLADriveBench, a framework that combines observational metrics (mentioning, hallucination, contradiction, action alignment) with a CoT intervention protocol to provide complementary views of the CoT-action relationship. Applying VLADriveBench to three models across two architectures, we find that the two analyses can diverge sharply: ORION scores highest on observational alignment yet its CoT is epiphenomenal, while Alpamayo v1.5 scores lower yet its CoT is strongly causal, with visual salience gating the extent of CoT influence.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 23 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2026.

Builds on

23 of 27 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Counterfactual VLA: Self-Reflective Vision-Language-Action Model with Adaptive Reasoning30 Dec
  2. 2025Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail30 Oct
  3. 2025Drive-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Planning in VLMs for Autonomous Driving with Reinforcement Learning23 Jun
  4. 2025OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning6 Apr
  5. 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generation25 Mar
  6. 2025AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning10 Mar

Other references · 17

  1. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  2. 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,449
  3. 2023Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Promptingcited by 1,122
  4. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  5. 2023Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 703
  6. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
  7. 2020Towards Faithfully Interpretable NLP Systems: How should we define and evaluate faithfulness?cited by 599
  8. 2023DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answeringcited by 536
  9. 2024DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 490
  10. 2023GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPTcited by 347
  11. 2024Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 252
  12. 2025ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 198
5 more
  1. 2025FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Drivingcited by 166
  2. 2024Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 156
  3. 2023LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Drivingcited by 145
  4. 2025Distilling Multi-modal Large Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 46
  5. 2025ALN-P3: Unified Language Alignment for Perception, Prediction, and Planning in Autonomous Drivingcited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

  1. 2026When Reasoning Helps Action: Monitoring and Steering Chain-of-Thought in Vision-Language-Action Policiescited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025CoT4AD: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Explicit Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Autonomous Driving
  2. 2026Drive the Thoughts: Runtime Monitoring of VLA Reasoning-Trajectory Consistency
  3. 2025Latent Chain-of-Thought World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
  4. 2026LaST-VLA: Thinking in Latent Spatio-Temporal Space for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving
  5. 2026Is VLA Reasoning Faithful? Probing Safety of Chain-of-Causation in Autonomous Driving Models
  6. 2025AutoDrive-R2: Incentivizing Reasoning and Self-Reflection Capacity for VLA Model in Autonomous Driving
  7. 2025DeepThinkVLA: Enhancing Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language-Action Models
  8. 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving