Vision-Language Work Zone Intelligence for Safety-Critical Speed Regulation of Mixed-Autonomy Vehicles in Dynamic Environments

Autonomous driving vision-language models (VLMs) struggle in roadwork zones, where familiar visual cues such as lane markings and permanent signs are altered or absent, and temporary devices such as cones and barriers redefine the drivable corridor. VLMs can detect these objects, but without explicit guidance they anchor their reasoning on familiar elements from pre-training and fail to connect work-zone observations to correct planning decisions. We propose WorkDrive, a framework that constructs perception-grounded causal reasoning for work zones and aligns it with trajectory prediction. An automated multitask perception pipeline extracts structured scene facts and injects them into a Chain-of-Causation (CoC) annotation pipeline, redirecting the annotator's attention to domain-specific elements. The resulting reasoning labels are used for supervised fine-tuning, followed by reinforcement learning with a single reward: consistency between lateral meta-actions and the predicted trajectory. On ROADWork, the largest public work-zone dataset, the proposed roadwork CoC reduces trajectory average displacement error (ADE) by 9.0%, and consistency-based GRPO yields a further 3.0%, achieving progressive improvement over the trajectory-only baseline. Code and data will be publicly released.

Work zones alter lane geometry through temporary traffic controls and closures that may be absent from on-board maps, challenging autonomous vehicle (AV) perception and planning. Generalization is also limited by scarce public datasets with structured geometric supervision. We present WorkZonePlan, a dataset comprising 149K+ synthetic and 5K+ real-world multimodal samples with 3D annotations for lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectory options. It also provides 76 closed-loop CARLA scenarios replayed under three weather conditions, yielding 228 Bench2Drive-format evaluation routes. We introduce WAVE (Work-zone-focused AV data generation in Virtual and rEal Environments), a semi-automated pipeline for creating the dataset, and BoundaryFormer (BF), a transformer-based model that jointly predicts lane and work zone boundary polynomials and driving trajectories. BF uses slot attention for boundary prediction. Ablations show that a separate trajectory decoder using boundary slot features substantially improves trajectory prediction over a slot-attention-only approach. Building on this finding, BF++ offers Camera and Camera+LiDAR variants with metric ground-plane encoding, typed boundary/trajectory queries, long-range point anchors, image-space curve refinement, and conservative gated LiDAR fusion. On the 211 routes common to all four models at the evaluation freeze, BF++-Camera and BF++-Camera+LiDAR achieve Driving Scores of 63.0 and 64.4, respectively, compared with 59.3 for SimLingo and 26.1 for TransFuser++ (TF++). BF++ is 40 times smaller than SimLingo and more than 10 times smaller than TF++, while achieving higher Driving Scores. These results support jointly predicting lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectories as a promising direction toward safer AV operation in work zones. Code and dataset: https://github.com/Nishad-Sahu/WZPlanner.

Autonomous vehicles often rely on high-definition (HD) maps for navigation; however, these maps are not frequently updated and often lack semi-static information, such as temporary roadwork zones, which can significantly alter the road network. This limitation underscores the urgent need for an accurate global position of roadwork zones. However, the absence of publicly available datasets for evaluating roadwork zone detection and geo-localization models has hindered the development of reliable autonomous driving systems. To address this challenge, we propose the Roadwork Zone Detection and Geo-localization (RZDG) dataset, which includes both simulated and real-world data, providing multimodal sensor inputs along with comprehensive annotations. The dataset supports multiple perception tasks, including image semantic segmentation, 3D object detection, and object geo-localization. In addition, we introduce a tracker-based roadwork zone detection and geo-localization (RZDG) pipeline, an extension of AB3DMOT, for accurate object geo-localization in roadwork zones. We benchmark our approach on the RZDG dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting roadwork zones and transforming object positions from the local coordinate system to the global coordinate system. A prediction is considered a true positive (TP) if its estimated position falls within one meter of the ground truth. Our experimental results show that our approach achieves high accuracy on both real and simulated data. Specifically, we report: Precision: 0.565 (real) / 0.615 (simulated) Recall: 0.898 (real) / 0.809 (simulated) F1-score: 0.597 (real) / 0.665 (simulated).