2025/11/25 by Shimeng Yu, Seonho Lee, Yu, Seungjun +12 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.20022
openalex publication_date 2025/11/25 · openalex created_date 2025/11/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong understanding of driving scenes, drawing interest in their application to autonomous driving. However, high-level reasoning in safety-critical scenarios, where avoiding one traffic risk can create another, remains a major challenge. Such reasoning is often infeasible with only a single front view and requires a comprehensive view of the environment, which we achieve through multi-view inputs. We define Safety-Critical Reasoning as a new task that leverages multi-view inputs to address this challenge. Then, we distill Safety-Critical Reasoning into two stages: first resolve the immediate risk, then mitigate the decision-induced downstream risks. To support this, we introduce WaymoQA, a dataset of 35,000 human-annotated question-answer pairs covering complex, high-risk driving scenarios. The dataset includes multiple-choice and open-ended formats across both image and video modalities. Experiments reveal that existing MLLMs underperform in safety-critical scenarios compared to normal scenes, but fine-tuning with WaymoQA significantly improves their reasoning ability, highlighting the effectiveness of our dataset in developing safer and more reasoning-capable driving agents. Our code and data are provided in https://github.com/sjyu001/WaymoQA