Towards Trustworthy and Explainable AI for Perception Models: From Concept to Prototype Vehicle Deployment

The application of computer vision is gradually increasing across various domains. They employ deep learning models with a black-box nature. Without the ability to explain the behavior of neural networks, especially their decision-making processes, it is not possible to recognize their efficiency, predict system failures, or effectively implement them in real-world applications. Due to the inevitable use of deep learning in fully automated driving systems, many methods have been proposed to explain their behavior; however, they suffer from flawed reasoning and unreliable metrics, which have prevented a comprehensive understanding of complex models in autonomous vehicles and hindered the development of truly reliable systems. In this study, we propose a multi-scale attention-based model in which driving decisions are fed into the reasoning component to provide case-specific explanations for each decision simultaneously. For quantitative evaluation of our model's performance, we employ the F1-score metric, and also proposed a new metric called the Joint F1 score to demonstrate the accurate and reliable performance of the model in terms of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In addition to the BDD-OIA dataset, the nu-AR dataset is utilized to further validate the generalization capability and robustness of the proposed network. The results demonstrate the superiority of our reasoning network over the classic and state-of-the-art models.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with integrated reasoning have been proposed for end-to-end autonomous driving, assuming a tight coupling between reasoning and trajectory generation. However, the robustness of such systems under realistic input perturbations remains largely unexplored. We show that these models are highly vulnerable to realistic input perturbations, achieving up to 89% attack success rate (ASR) on reasoning and up to 72% on trajectory manipulation in closed-loop simulation, leading to increased collision rates and degraded safety metrics. Using NVIDIA's recent Alpamayo models as representative industry-developed VLAs, we conduct the first systematic black-box study of reasoning-enabled VLA models under realistic textual input corruptions, evaluating their impact on reasoning and driving behavior. We introduce a reasoning-aware evaluation framework capturing both semantic and structural aspects of reasoning, along with safety-centric measures. We also introduce a benchmark for evaluating attacks and defenses on reasoning-trajectory interactions in autonomous driving. Our results highlight the need for rigorous evaluation and improved defenses to ensure the safety of reasoning-enabled VLA systems in autonomous driving.

Interpretable autonomous driving planners depend not only on generating explanations, but also on those explanations remaining reliable under real-world sensor degradation. In this paper we present a controlled perturbation study of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) robustness in autonomous driving, evaluating Alpamayo R1 (10B parameters) across 1,996 scenarios under eight sensor perturbations (Gaussian noise at four intensities, two lighting extremes, and two fog levels; ${\sim}18{,}000$ inference trials). We find that reasoning consistency is a high-fidelity indicator of trajectory reliability: when Chain-of-Causation (CoC) explanations change after perturbation, trajectory deviation spikes $5.3{\times}$ (21.8m vs 4.1m), with $r\!=\!0.99$ across attack types and $r_{pb}\!=\!0.53$ per-sample (Cohen's $d\!=\!1.12$). A controlled ablation provides evidence that enabling CoC generation is associated with improved trajectory accuracy (11.8% on average across conditions; $p < 0.0001$) under matched inference settings. Over the tested noise range ($σ\in \{10, 30, 50, 70\}$), degradation is approximately linear ($R^2\!=\!0.957$), while standard input preprocessing defenses provide only marginal relief. Together, these results establish CoC consistency as a quantitative proxy for planning safety and motivate reasoning-based runtime monitoring for safer VLA deployment.