Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Driving
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Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
arXiv:2609.01659 (cs)
[Submitted on 31 Aug 2026]
Title:Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Driving
Authors:Zhengxu Tang, Xiaozhou Zhang, Guofeng Cui, Ziyu Gong, Zi Wang, Yunfei Shi, Ruifeng Deng, Chengzhi Qi, Ke Chen, Sachin Patil, Tianjun Xiao, Langechuan Liu, Pichao Wang
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Abstract:Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning powers generative models by eliciting intermediate steps before producing an answer. In autonomous driving, the answer is a continuous action. Thus its reasoning must share the same spatiotemporal structure as the physical world. This survey studies the resulting shift from textual CoT to action-grounded reasoning. Surveying 171 papers, including 130 method papers and 41 benchmarks, datasets, surveys, and analysis papers, we propose a representation-centered taxonomy that treats the form of the intermediate state as the organizing axis. We systematize the 130 methods into four categories: language-based, visual-spatial, latent-dynamic, and externalized reasoning, further divided into 13 subtypes tied to distinct regions of interests. Our synthesis shows that the open frontier of reasoning in driving agents lies in intermediate representations that can be grounded in the real world, coupled to real-time action, and verified under safety-critical systems. Project page: this https URL.
| Comments: | Accepted by EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Robotics (cs.RO) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.01659 [cs.CV] |
| (or arXiv:2609.01659v1 [cs.CV] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01659
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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View a PDF of the paper titled Beyond Textual Chain-of-Thought: A Survey on Action-Grounded Reasoning in Autonomous Driving, by Zhengxu Tang and 12 other authors
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