V2X-VLM: End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving Through Large Vision-Language Models

Advancements in autonomous driving have increasingly focused on end-to-end (E2E) systems that manage the full spectrum of driving tasks, from environmental perception to vehicle navigation and control. This paper introduces V2X-VLM, an innovative E2E vehicle-infrastructure cooperative autonomous driving (VICAD) framework with Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) systems and large vision-language models (VLMs). V2X-VLM is designed to enhance situational awareness, decision-making, and ultimate trajectory planning by integrating multimodel data from vehicle-mounted cameras, infrastructure sensors, and textual information. The contrastive learning method is further employed to complement VLM by refining feature discrimination, assisting the model to learn robust representations of the driving environment. Evaluations on the DAIR-V2X dataset show that V2X-VLM outperforms state-of-the-art cooperative autonomous driving methods, while additional tests on corner cases validate its robustness in real-world driving conditions.