The Review on Development of Large Language Models for Autonomous Vehicles

Authors

  • Sicheng Wang

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54691/v46m6m31

Keywords:

Large language model, autonomous driving, AI training systems, automation, humanless economy.

Abstract

Autonomous driving systems rely heavily on visual inputs. The Large Language Model mainly trains this. A large language model is a deep-learning model trained with a lot of text data. It is one of the most important models for operating AI systems and their learning and training work. Autonomous vehicles are an emerging new operating system used for driving in recent decades, and large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated abilities including understanding context, logical reasoning, and generating answers. A natural thought is to utilize these abilities to empower autonomous driving. Recent advances in Visual Language Models (VLMs) drive a paradigm shift in autonomous driving research. The field is transitioning from training perception and policy models from scratch toward adopting a new "pre-training + fine-tuning" paradigm. Using a large language model on cars can help the AI system drive and provide car owners with a safer, faster, and more comfortable service. Thus, autonomous driving technology, a catalyst for revolutionizing transportation and urban mobility, tends to transition from rule-based systems to data-driven strategies.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

[1] Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Jeff Donahue, Pauline Luc, Antoine Miech, Iain Barr, Yana Hasson, Karel Lenc, Arthur Mensch, Katherine Millican, Malcolm Reynolds, et al. Flamingo: a visual language model for few-shot learning. Advances in neural information processing systems, 35:23716–23736, 2022. 3

[2] Florent Altche and Arnaud de La Fortelle. An LSTM network for highway trajectory prediction. In 2017 IEEE 20th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), pages 353–359. IEEE, 2017. 2

[3] Florent Bartoccioni, Elias Ramzi, Victor Besnier, Shashanka Venkataramanan, Tuan-Hung Vu, Yihong Xu, Loick Chambon, Spyros Gidaris, Serkan Odabas, David Hurych, et al. Vavim and vavam: Autonomous driving through video generative modeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15672, 2025. 5, 8

[4] Kevin Black, Noah Brown, Danny Driess, Adnan Esmail, Michael Equi, Chelsea Finn, Niccolo Fusai, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, et al. pi0: A vision-language-action flow model for general robot control. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.24164, 2024. 4

[5] Joost Broekens, Bernhard Hilpert, Suzan Verberne, Kim Baraka, Patrick Gebhard, and Aske Plaat. Fine-grained affective processing capabilities emerging from large language models. In the 2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), pages 1–8. IEEE, 2023. 4

[6] Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D. Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, et al. Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33:1877–1901, 2020. 5

[7] Holger Caesar, Alex Bankiti, Orien Lang, et al. nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving. In CVPR, 2020. 2, 7, 9

[8] Holger Caesar, Varun Bankiti, Alex H. Lang, Sourabh Vora, Venice Erin Liong, Qiang Xu, Anush Krishnan, Yu Pan, Giancarlo Baldan, and Oscar Beijbom. nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 11621–11631, 2020. 4

[9] Dian Chen and Philipp Krahenbuhl. Learning from all vehicles. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 17222–17231, 2022. 2

[10] Dianwei Chen, Zifan Zhang, Yuchen Liu, and Xianfeng Terry Yang. Insight: Enhancing autonomous driving safety through vision-language models on context-aware hazard detection and edge case evaluation. arXiv e-prints, pages arXiv–2502, 2025. 4

[11] Michael Ahn, Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Yevgen Chebotar, Omar Cortes, Byron David, Chelsea Finn, Chuyuan Fu, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Karol Hausman, et al. Do as I can, not as I say: Grounding language in robotic affordances. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.01691, 2022.

[12] Sajid Ali, Tamer Abuhmed, Shaker El-Sappagh, Khan Muhammad, Jose M. Alonso-Moral, Roberto Confalonieri, Riccardo Guidotti, Javier Del Ser, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, and Francisco Herrera. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI): What we know and what is left to attain trustworthy artificial intelligence. Information Fusion, 99:101805, 2023.

[13] Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D. Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, et al. Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33:1877–1901, 2020.

[14] Long Chen, Oleg Sinavski, Jan Hünermann, Alice Karnsund, Andrew James Willmott, Danny Birch, Daniel Maund, and Jamie Shotton. Driving with LLMs: Fusing object-level vector modality for explainable autonomous driving. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.01957, 2023.

[15] J. Mao, J., Ye, Y., Qian, M., Pavone, M., and Y. Wang, “A language agent for autonomous driving,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.10813, 2023.

[16] Y. Jin, X. Shen, H. Peng, X. Liu, J. Qin, J. Li, J. Xie, P. Gao, G. Zhou, and J. Gong, “Surrealdriver: Designing generative driver agent simulation framework in urban contexts based on large language model,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.13193, 2023.

[17] C. Sima, K. Renz, K. Chitta, L. Chen, H. Zhang, C. Xie, P. Luo, A. Geiger, and H. Li, “Drivelm: Driving with graph visual question answering,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.14150, 2023.

[18] T.-H. Wang, A. Maalouf, W. Xiao, Y. Ban, A. Amini, G. Rosman, S. Karaman, and D. Rus, “Drive anywhere: Generalizable end-to-end autonomous driving with multi-modal foundation models,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.17642, 2023.

[19] D. Wu, W. Han, T. Wang, Y. Liu, X. Zhang, and J. Shen, “Language prompt for autonomous driving,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.04379, 2023.

[20] T. Qian, J. Chen, L. Zhuo, Y. Jiao, and Y.-G. Jiang, “Nuscenes-qa: A multi-modal visual question answering benchmark for autonomous driving scenario.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.14836, 2023.

[21] M. Nie, R., Peng, C., Wang, X., Cai, J., Han, H., Xu, H., and L. Zhang, “Reason2drive: Towards interpretable and chain-based reasoning for autonomous driving.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.03661, 2023.

[22] K. Chitta, A. Prakash, and A. Geiger, “Neat: Neural attention fields for end-to-end autonomous driving,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2021, pp. 15 793–15 803.

[23] Xinpeng Ding, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Wei Zhang, and Xiaomeng Li. Hilm-d: Towards high-resolution understanding in multimodal large language models for autonomous driving, 2023.

[24] Xinpeng Ding, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang, Wei Zhang, and Xiaomeng Li. Holistic autonomous driving understanding by bird’s-eye-view injected multi-modal large models. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 13668–13677, 2024.

[25] Danny Driess, Fei Xia, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Corey Lynch, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Brian Ichter, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Quan Vuong, Tianhe Yu, Wenlong Huang, Yevgen Chebotar, Pierre Sermanet, Daniel Duckworth, Sergey Levine, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karol Hausman, Marc Toussaint, Klaus Greff, Andy Zeng, Igor Mordatch, and Pete Florence. Palm-e: An embodied multimodal language model, 2023.

[26] Scott Ettinger, Shuyang Cheng, Benjamin Caine, Chenxi Liu, Hang Zhao, Sabeek Pradhan, Yuning Chai, Ben Sapp, Charles Qi, Yin Zhou, Zoey Yang, Aurelien Chouard, Pei Sun, Jiquan Ngiam, Vijay Vasudevan, Alexander McCauley, Jonathon Shlens, and Dragomir Anguelov. Large-scale interactive motion forecasting for autonomous driving: The Waymo open motion dataset, 2021.

[27] Whye Kit Fong, Rohit Mohan, Juana Valeria Hurtado, Lubing Zhou, Holger Caesar, Oscar Beijbom, and Abhinav Valada. Panoptic Nuscene: A large-scale benchmark for lidar panoptic segmentation and tracking. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.03805, 2021.

[28] Daocheng Fu, Xin Li, Licheng Wen, Min Dou, Pinlong Cai, Botian Shi, and Yu Qiao. Drive like a human: Rethinking autonomous driving with large language models, 2023.

[29] Jinlan Fu, See-Kiong Ng, Zhengbao Jiang, and Pengfei Liu. GPTScore: Evaluate as you desire, 2023.

Downloads

Published

2025-10-29

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Wang, Sicheng. 2025. “The Review on Development of Large Language Models for Autonomous Vehicles”. Scientific Journal of Intelligent Systems Research 7 (10): 17-23. https://doi.org/10.54691/v46m6m31.