AutoDriDM: An Explainable Benchmark for Decision-Making of Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving is a highly challenging domain that 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 and metrics overemphasize perceptual competence and fail to adequately assess decision-making processes. In this work, we present AutoDriDM, a decision-centric, progressive benchmark with 6,650 questions across three dimensions - Object, Scene, and Decision. We evaluate mainstream VLMs to delineate the perception-to-decision capability boundary in autonomous driving, and our correlation analysis reveals weak alignment between perception and decision-making performance. We further conduct explainability analyses of models' reasoning processes, identifying key failure modes such as logical reasoning errors, and introduce an analyzer model to automate large-scale annotation. AutoDriDM bridges the gap between perception-centered and decision-centered evaluation, providing guidance toward safer and more reliable VLMs for real-world autonomous driving.

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.