Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multi-Modal Language models (MMLMs) have become prominent in autonomous driving research, as these models can provide interpretable textual reasoning and responses for end-to-end autonomous driving safety tasks using traffic scene images and other data modalities. However, current approaches to these systems use expensive large language model (LLM) backbones and image encoders, making such systems unsuitable for real-time autonomous driving systems where tight memory constraints exist and fast inference time is necessary. To address these previous issues, we develop EM-VLM4AD, an efficient, lightweight, multi-frame vision language model which performs Visual Question Answering for autonomous driving. In comparison to previous approaches, EM-VLM4AD requires at least 10 times less memory and floating point operations, while also achieving higher BLEU-4, METEOR, CIDEr, and ROGUE scores than the existing baseline on the DriveLM dataset. EM-VLM4AD also exhibits the ability to extract relevant information from traffic views related to prompts and can answer questions for various autonomous driving subtasks. We release our code to train and evaluate our model at https://github.com/akshaygopalkr/EM-VLM4AD.

EM-VLM4AD是一种轻量级、高效的多帧视觉语言模型，用于自动驾驶中的视觉问答任务，相较于先前方法，它在内存和浮点运算资源的使用上减少了至少10倍，并在DriveLM数据集上获得了更高的BLEU-4、METEOR、CIDEr和ROGUE分数。

自动驾驶问答的多帧、轻量级和高效视觉语言模型