# Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving Guided by Chinese Philosophical Wisdom

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03948 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03948/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Agentic RAG, agents and memory](https://mlsanity.com/rag/agentic-rag-agents-and-memory/)
- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Large language models for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/large-language-models-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00444/) (2020)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01415/) (2023)
- [LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07488/) (2023)
- [DiLu: A Knowledge-Driven Approach to Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16292/) (2023)
- [LanguageMPC: Large Language Models as Decision Makers for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03026/) (2023)
- [A Language Agent for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10813/) (2023)
- [Drive Like a Human: Rethinking Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07162/) (2023)
- [On a Formal Model of Safe and Scalable Self-driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06374/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Deep RL and IL for Autonomous Driving Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01993/) (2021)
- [Tokenize the World into Object-level Knowledge to Address Long-tail Events in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00959/) (2024)
- [The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03346/) (2015)
- [Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06899/) (2023)
- [LimSim++: A Closed-Loop Platform for Deploying Multimodal LLMs in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01246/) (2024)
- [KoMA: Knowledge-driven Multi-agent Framework for Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14239/) (2024)
- [SafeDriveRAG: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving with Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21585/) (2025)
- [Driving with Regulation: Trustworthy and Interpretable Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04759/) (2024)
- [BEV-TSR: Text-Scene Retrieval in BEV Space for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01065/) (2024)
- [CMoralEval: A Moral Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09819/) (2024)
- [KnowVal: A Knowledge-Augmented and Value-Guided Autonomous Driving System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20299/) (2025)
- [VeTraSS: Vehicle Trajectory Similarity Search Through Graph Modeling and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08021/) (2024)
- [PICACO: Pluralistic In-Context Value Alignment of LLMs via Total Correlation Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16679/) (2025)
- [VLADriver-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08133/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving decision systems must balance safety, efficiency, and social norms in complex traffic interactions. Philosophical and ethical considerations have received limited attention in existing autonomous driving decision-making approaches based on numerical optimization, sequence prediction, and large language models (LLMs). We propose Chinese Philosophical Wisdom-Guided Driving (CPW-Drive), a closed-loop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that incorporates value guidance derived from Chinese philosophy into autonomous driving decision-making. Using Chinese Confucian thought as its knowledge source, CPW-Drive consolidates LLM-extracted keywords from relevant classical texts into driving-relevant value principles through manual screening and validation. It then contextualizes these principles through scenario-specific cases to form retrievable and reusable value guidance. We further propose Physics-aware Spatial Similarity Retrieval (PSSR), which compares vehicle layouts and velocity-extrapolated states to retrieve physically relevant historical cases. On Highway-env's multilane highway-driving task, CPW-Drive achieves success rates of 93.0%, 86.0%, and 72.0% across three traffic configurations. These results outperform the strongest baseline by 8.0, 22.5, and 25.0 percentage points, respectively. Across all configurations, CPW-Drive achieves the highest collision-free step count and maintains a low lane-change frequency. The results suggest that structured value guidance can improve simulated closed-loop safety and stability while introducing efficiency and latency trade-offs.