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CausalDriveBench introduces a rigorous evaluation framework that tests whether autonomous driving models truly understand causal scene structures rather than merely correlating visual cues with actions. The study reveals significant gaps in current Vision-Language-Action models, showing that fluent reasoning text and accurate trajectory predictions do not necessarily indicate genuine causal comprehension. This benchmark is critical for advancing safe autonomous systems by distinguishing between superficial pattern matching and robust, counterfactual-aware decision-making.
CausalDriveBench: Evaluating Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving
arXiv:2609.32157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving produce natural-language reasoning alongside predicted trajectories, but whether this reasoning reflects the causal structure of the scene remains untested. We introduce CausalDriveBench, an evaluation framework grounded in Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH) that tests causal reasoning in driving-specific VLAs through structured visual question answering (QA) and alternative-trajectory prediction. To this end, we construct causal scene graphs over nuScenes that distinguish causally active, dormant, and distractor entities, separating perceptual salience from causal relevance. The benchmark spans all four rungs of PCH (association, intervention, and counterfactual along with causal discovery) for QA generation. For the higher rungs, we additionally provide reference trajectories under specified scene modifications, enabling action-level verification that complements reasoning-level evaluation. In total, the benchmark contains 7,285 verified causal QA pairs and 1,000 counterfactual trajectories derived from nuScenes. We evaluate 10 driving-specific VLAs and 3 general-purpose VLMs, and report three findings. First, the best model reaches only 70.6% QA accuracy, and 4 of 13 models score below random chance. Second, comparing each driving VLA to the general-purpose VLM that shares its language backbone, the cost of driving fine-tuning ranges from 2 to 34 percentage points on causal QA, with post-training design explaining the spread. Third, causal QA and trajectory accuracy are statistically uncorrelated across models: under counterfactual prompts, predicted trajectories either over-react or collapse onto the observed-scene baseline. Taken together, these results show that neither fluent rationales nor accurate observed-scene trajectories constitute evidence of causal understanding.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving produce natural-language reasoning alongside predicted trajectories, but whether this reasoning reflects the causal structure of the scene remains untested. We introduce CausalDriveBench, an evaluation framework grounded in Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH) that tests causal reasoning in driving-specific VLAs through structured visual question answering (QA) and alternative-trajectory prediction. To this end, we construct causal scene graphs over nuScenes that distinguish causally active, dormant, and distractor entities, separating perceptual salience from causal relevance. The benchmark spans all four rungs of PCH (association, intervention, and counterfactual along with causal discovery) for QA generation. For the higher rungs, we additionally provide reference trajectories under specified scene modifications, enabling action-level verification that complements reasoning-level evaluation. In total, the benchmark contains 7,285 verified causal QA pairs and 1,000 counterfactual trajectories derived from nuScenes. We evaluate 10 driving-specific VLAs and 3 general-purpose VLMs, and report three findings. First, the best model reaches only 70.6% QA accuracy, and 4 of 13 models score below random chance. Second, comparing each driving VLA to the general-purpose VLM that shares its language backbone, the cost of driving fine-tuning ranges from 2 to 34 percentage points on causal QA, with post-training design explaining the spread. Third, causal QA and trajectory accuracy are statistically uncorrelated across models: under counterfactual prompts, predicted trajectories either over-react or collapse onto the observed-scene baseline. Taken together, these results show that neither fluent rationales nor accurate observed-scene trajectories constitute evidence of causal understanding.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2609.32157 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.32157v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.32157 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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