# LANTERN: A Closed-Loop Benchmark for VLM-Based Cooperative Driving with Temporally Grounded Warnings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06368/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Cooperative and V2X driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 16 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Cooperative and V2X driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/cooperative-and-v2x-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Where2comm: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Spatial Confidence Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12836/) (2022)
- [CoBEVT: Cooperative Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02202/) (2022)
- [Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08710/) (2023)
- [V2X-Sim: Multi-Agent Collaborative Perception Dataset and Benchmark for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08449/) (2022)
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025)
- [AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06549/) (2021)
- [Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03661/) (2023)
- [SafeBench: A Benchmarking Platform for Safety Evaluation of Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09682/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Autonomous Driving through V2X Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00717/) (2024)
- [Fail2Drive: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Driving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08535/) (2026)
- [V2X-UniPool: Unifying Multimodal Perception and Knowledge Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02580/) (2025)
- [V2X-QA: A Comprehensive Reasoning Dataset and Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving Across Ego, Infrastructure, and Cooperative Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02710/) (2026)
- [M3CAD: Towards Generic Cooperative Autonomous Driving Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06746/) (2025)
- [ICR-Drive: Instruction Counterfactual Robustness for End-to-End Language-Driven Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05378/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present LANTERN, a closed-loop benchmark for temporally grounded cooperative warnings. LANTERN separates warning onset, hazard onset, warning termination, and post-hazard recovery, and evaluates each physical event under matched warning and no-warning executions so that the warning's contribution is measured in isolation rather than confounded with onboard vision. The benchmark spans six safety-critical scenario families and provides 3,272 sequences with 236,309 frames for training, together with 120 matched route pairs for closed-loop evaluation. Each hazard route is evaluated under the warning and no-warning conditions, while its no-hazard control penalizes unconditional braking. We further introduce the Cooperative Unified Score (CUS), a safety-gated metric that jointly rewards route progress, anticipation, clearance, and recovery. Fine-tuning a representative VLM driving model raises CUS from 34.6 without warnings to 75.5 with them, demonstrating both the value of cooperative warnings and the discriminative power of the paired protocol. All resources will be made publicly available.