# Qwen-Drive-1.0: An Initial Step towards a Vision-Language Foundation Model for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00111 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00111/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 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 93 of its 108 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 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, 30 of 93)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [PETR: Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05625/) (2022)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [MonoScene: Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00726/) (2021)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [PETRv2: A Unified Framework for 3D Perception from Multi-Camera Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01256/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (2024)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [NuScenes-QA: A Multi-modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14836/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06055/) (2026)
- [OPTED: On-Policy Fine-Tuning for End-to-End Driving using a Render-Free Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20756/) (2026)
- [Hard Vision, Easy Vision: What GPT-6 Astra Reveals Across Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35718/) (2026)
- [GRAVA: Grounded Reasoning-to-Action Representation and Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15169/) (2026)
- [When the Score Becomes the Target: Rethinking Metric Validity in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34440/) (2026)
- [RefineDrive: Reliable Failure-Guided Learning for Vision-Language-Action Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35078/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38641/) (2026)
- [PlanWAM: Planning-Shaped Future Representations for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11382/) (2026)
- [DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17903/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Qwen-Drive-1.0, an initial step towards a vision-language foundation model for autonomous driving. Qwen-Drive-1.0 retains the architecture of the pretrained vision-language model (VLM) and integrates 3D perception, visual question answering, and motion planning within a unified framework. An external bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception head jointly performs 3D object detection, semantic occupancy prediction, and BEV map segmentation. It serves as a probe of the 3D information accessible from the shared representations and provides an explicit, inspectable interface to 3D scene structure. A Planning Expert conditions on shared VLM representations to generate future ego trajectories. A staged training recipe combines driving supervision with general-purpose vision-language data to acquire driving-specific competence while helping preserve broad visual understanding and instruction-following capabilities. Experiments demonstrate strong 3D perception and driving scene understanding while largely preserving general vision-language capability. Comprehensive evaluations across open-loop, pseudo-closed-loop, and closed-loop settings further show highly competitive motion-planning performance.