Speed in the Blind Spot: An Interpretability Analysis of Dynamic Perception in VLMs for Autonomous Driving
Vision-Language Models are increasingly used in autonomous-driving systems, yet their ability to recover dynamic physical state from visual input remains insufficiently characterized. We study velocity understanding as a controlled diagnostic across three tasks: surrounding-agent speed, current ego speed, and short-horizon future ego-speed proposal. On nuScenes, we evaluate open-weight general-purpose and PhysicalAI VLMs, together with the driving-oriented Alpamayo-1.5 Vision-Language-Action model, using multiple input and output formulations. We combine verbal evaluation with temporal perturbations, counterfactual ego-speed hints and linear probes of hidden representations. The tasks exh...
| Authors | Katharina Winter, Stefan Englmeier, Fabian B. Flohr |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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