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Probing Visual Concepts in Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Automated Driving
Authors:
Nikos Theodoridis,
Reenu Mohandas,
Ganesh Sistu,
Anthony Scanlan,
Ciarán Eising,
Tim Brophy
Abstract:
The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios. However, these models often fail on simple visual questions that are highly relevant to automated driving, and the reasons behind these failures remain poorly understood. In this work, w…
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The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios. However, these models often fail on simple visual questions that are highly relevant to automated driving, and the reasons behind these failures remain poorly understood. In this work, we examine the intermediate activations of VLMs and assess the extent to which specific visual concepts are linearly encoded, with the goal of identifying bottlenecks in the flow of visual information. Specifically, we create counterfactual image sets that differ only in a targeted visual concept and then train linear probes to distinguish between them using the activations of five state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs, including two training variants for one model. Our results show that concepts such as the presence of an object or agent in a scene are explicitly and linearly encoded, whereas other spatial visual concepts, such as the orientation of an object or agent, are only implicitly encoded by the spatial structure retained by the vision encoder, or are not linearly encoded at all. In parallel, we observe that in certain cases, even when a concept is linearly encoded in the model's activations, the model still fails to answer correctly. This leads us to identify two failure modes. The first is perceptual failure, where the visual information required to answer a question is not linearly encoded in the model's activations. The second is cognitive failure, where the visual information is present but the model fails to align it correctly with language semantics. Finally, we show that increasing the distance of the object in question quickly degrades the linear separability of the corresponding visual concept...
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Submitted 6 August, 2026; v1 submitted 6 March, 2026;
originally announced March 2026.
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Descriptor: Distance-Annotated Traffic Perception Question Answering (DTPQA)
Authors:
Nikos Theodoridis,
Tim Brophy,
Reenu Mohandas,
Ganesh Sistu,
Fiachra Collins,
Anthony Scanlan,
Ciaran Eising
Abstract:
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 simul…
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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.
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Submitted 14 May, 2026; v1 submitted 17 November, 2025;
originally announced November 2025.
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Evaluating Small Vision-Language Models on Distance-Dependent Traffic Perception
Authors:
Nikos Theodoridis,
Tim Brophy,
Reenu Mohandas,
Ganesh Sistu,
Fiachra Collins,
Anthony Scanlan,
Ciaran Eising
Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly powerful, demonstrating strong performance on a variety of tasks that require both visual and textual understanding. Their strong generalisation abilities make them a promising component for automated driving systems, which must handle unexpected corner cases. However, to be trusted in such safety-critical applications, a model must first pos…
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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly powerful, demonstrating strong performance on a variety of tasks that require both visual and textual understanding. Their strong generalisation abilities make them a promising component for automated driving systems, which must handle unexpected corner cases. However, to be trusted in such safety-critical applications, a model must first possess a reliable perception system. Moreover, since critical objects and agents in traffic scenes are often at a distance, we require systems that are not "shortsighted", i.e., systems with strong perception capabilities at both close (up to 20 meters) and long (30+ meters) range. With this in mind, we introduce Distance-Annotated Traffic Perception Question Answering (DTPQA), the first Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark focused solely on perception-based questions in traffic scenes, enriched with distance annotations. By excluding questions that require reasoning, we ensure that model performance reflects perception capabilities alone. Since automated driving hardware has limited processing power and cannot support large VLMs, our study centers on smaller VLMs. More specifically, we evaluate several state-of-the-art (SOTA) small VLMs on DTPQA and show that, despite the simplicity of the questions, these models significantly underperform compared to humans (~60% average accuracy for the best-performing small VLM versus ~85% human performance). However, it is important to note that the human sample size was relatively small, which imposes statistical limitations. We also identify specific perception tasks, such as distinguishing left from right, that remain particularly challenging for these models.
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Submitted 10 December, 2025; v1 submitted 9 October, 2025;
originally announced October 2025.