arXiv subjects

Tianjian Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Tianjian Gao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Drive-KD: Multi-Teacher Distillation for VLMs in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving is an important and safety-critical task, and recent advances in LLMs/VLMs have opened new possibilities for reasoning and planning in this domain. However, large models demand substantial GPU memory and exhibit high inference latency, while conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often struggles to bridge the capability gaps of small models. To address these limitations, we propose Drive-KD, a framework that decomposes autonomous driving into a "perception-reasoning-planning" triad and transfers these capabilities via knowledge distillation. We identify layer-specific attention as the distillation signal to construct capability-specific single-teacher models that outperform baselines. Moreover, we unify these single-teacher settings into a multi-teacher distillation framework and introduce asymmetric gradient projection to mitigate cross-capability gradient conflicts. Extensive evaluations validate the generalization of our method across diverse model families and scales. Experiments show that our distilled InternVL3-1B model, with ~42 times less GPU memory and ~11.4 times higher throughput, achieves better overall performance than the pretrained 78B model from the same family on DriveBench, and surpasses GPT-5.1 on the planning dimension, providing insights toward efficient autonomous driving VLMs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Drive-P2D: A Progressive Perception-to-Decision Benchmark for VLMs in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving requires reliable perception and safe decision-making in complex scenarios. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate reasoning and generalization abilities, opening new possibilities for autonomous driving; however, existing benchmarks often evaluate perception and decision-making separately, limit failure analysis with choice-only formats, or introduce evaluation bias through LLM-scored long-form outputs. To address these issues, we present Drive-P2D, a progressive perception-to-decision benchmark with 6,650 questions across Object, Scene, and Decision levels. Drive-P2D adopts a separated reasoning-and-answer protocol: final answers are scored objectively, while reasoning is analyzed to identify error modes exposed along the progressive perception-to-decision chain. We evaluate mainstream VLMs across all and high-risk scenarios, and further characterize the perception-to-decision capability boundary through correlation analysis and similar-scene robustness testing. Reasoning further exposes failure modes such as logical reasoning errors and semantic feature omissions, and we train a lightweight analyzer model to automate large-scale error-mode annotation of reasoning. Together, these designs provide practical insights for building safer and more reliable VLMs for real-world autonomous driving.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

RaTE: a Reproducible automatic Taxonomy Evaluation by Filling the Gap

Taxonomies are an essential knowledge representation, yet most studies on automatic taxonomy construction (ATC) resort to manual evaluation to score proposed algorithms. We argue that automatic taxonomy evaluation (ATE) is just as important as taxonomy construction. We propose RaTE, an automatic label-free taxonomy scoring procedure, which relies on a large pre-trained language model. We apply our evaluation procedure to three state-of-the-art ATC algorithms with which we built seven taxonomies from the Yelp domain, and show that 1) RaTE correlates well with human judgments and 2) artificially degrading a taxonomy leads to decreasing RaTE score.

cs.CL↗