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arXiv · 2505.05098

X-Driver: Explainable Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models

Wei Liu·Jiyuan Zhang·Binxiong Zheng·Yufeng Hu·Yingzhan Lin·Zengfeng Zeng
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Abstract

End-to-end autonomous driving has advanced significantly, offering benefits such as system simplicity and stronger driving performance in both open-loop and closed-loop settings than conventional pipelines. However, existing frameworks still suffer from low success rates in closed-loop evaluations, highlighting their limitations in real-world deployment. In this paper, we introduce X-Driver, a unified multi-modal large language models(MLLMs) framework designed for closed-loop autonomous driving, leveraging Chain-of-Thought(CoT) and autoregressive modeling to enhance perception and decision-making. We validate X-Driver across multiple autonomous driving tasks using public benchmarks in CARLA simulation environment, including Bench2Drive[6]. Our experimental results demonstrate superior closed-loop performance, surpassing the current state-of-the-art(SOTA) while improving the interpretability of driving decisions. These findings underscore the importance of structured reasoning in end-to-end driving and establish X-Driver as a strong baseline for future research in closed-loop autonomous driving.

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Wei Liu, Jiyuan Zhang, Binxiong Zheng, Yufeng Hu, Yingzhan Lin, Zengfeng Zeng. 2025-05-08. X-Driver: Explainable Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05098

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