People are relying on AI agents to assist them with various tasks.

The remarkable progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on a variety of tasks has raised interest in their application to automated driving. However, for these models to be trusted in such a safety-critical domain, they must first possess robust perception capabilities, i.e., they must be capable of understanding a traffic scene, which can often be highly complex, with many things happening simultaneously. Moreover, since critical objects and agents in traffic scenes are often at long distances, we require systems with not only strong perception capabilities at close distances (up to 20 meters), but also at long (30+ meters) range. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the perception capabilities of these models in isolation from other skills like reasoning or advanced world knowledge. Distance-Annotated Traffic Perception Question Answering (DTPQA) is a Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark designed specifically for this purpose: it can be used to evaluate the perception systems of VLMs in traffic scenarios using trivial yet crucial questions relevant to driving decisions. It consists of two parts: a synthetic benchmark (DTP-Synthetic) created using a simulator, and a real-world benchmark (DTP-Real) built on top of existing images of real traffic scenes. Additionally, DTPQA includes distance annotations, i.e., how far the object in question is from the camera. More specifically, each DTPQA sample consists of (at least): (a) an image, (b) a question, (c) the ground truth answer, and (d) the distance of the object in question, enabling analysis of how VLM performance degrades with increasing object distance. In this article, we provide the dataset itself along with the Python scripts used to create it, which can be used to generate additional data of the same kind.

Trustworthy AI is mandatory for the broad deployment of autonomous vehicles. Although end-to-end approaches derive control commands directly from raw data, interpreting these decisions remains challenging, especially in complex urban scenarios. This is mainly attributed to very deep neural networks with non-linear decision boundaries, making it challenging to grasp the logic behind AI-driven decisions. This paper presents a method to enhance interpretability while optimizing control commands in autonomous driving. To address this, we propose loss functions that promote the interpretability of our model by generating sparse and localized feature maps. The feature activations allow us to explain which image regions contribute to the predicted control command. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies on the feature extraction step and validate our method on the CARLA benchmarks. We also demonstrate that our approach improves interpretability, which correlates with reducing infractions, yielding a safer, high-performance driving model. Notably, our monocular, non-ensemble model surpasses the top-performing approaches from the CARLA Leaderboard by achieving lower infraction scores and the highest route completion rate, all while ensuring interpretability.

People are relying on AI agents to assist them with various tasks.

Autonomous driving (AD) has achieved significant progress, yet single-vehicle perception remains constrained by sensing range and occlusions. Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication addresses these limits by enabling collaboration across vehicles and infrastructure, but it also faces heterogeneity, synchronization, and latency constraints. Language models offer strong knowledge-driven reasoning and decision-making capabilities, but they are not inherently designed to process raw sensor streams and are prone to hallucination. We propose V2X-UniPool, the first framework that unifies V2X perception with language-based reasoning for knowledge-driven AD. It transforms multimodal V2X data into structured, language-based knowledge, organizes it in a time-indexed knowledge pool for temporally consistent reasoning, and employs Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to ground decisions in real-time context. Experiments on the real-world DAIR-V2X dataset show that V2X-UniPool achieves state-of-the-art planning accuracy and safety while reducing communication cost by more than 80\%, achieving the lowest overhead among evaluated methods. These results highlight the promise of bridging V2X perception and language reasoning to advance scalable and trustworthy driving. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Xuewen2025/V2X-UniPool