V2X-VLM: End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving Through Large Vision-Language Models

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) cooperation has emerged as a promising paradigm to overcome the perception limitations of classical autonomous driving by leveraging information from both ego-vehicle and infrastructure sensors. However, effectively fusing heterogeneous visual and semantic information while ensuring robust trajectory planning remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces V2X-VLM, a novel end-to-end (E2E) cooperative autonomous driving framework based on vision-language models (VLMs). V2X-VLM integrates multiperspective camera views from vehicles and infrastructure with text-based scene descriptions to enable a more comprehensive understanding of driving environments. Specifically, we propose a contrastive learning-based mechanism to reinforce the alignment of heterogeneous visual and textual characteristics, which enhances the semantic understanding of complex driving scenarios, and employ a knowledge distillation strategy to stabilize training. Experiments on a large real-world dataset demonstrate that V2X-VLM achieves state-of-the-art trajectory planning accuracy, significantly reducing L2 error and collision rate compared to existing cooperative autonomous driving baselines. Ablation studies validate the contributions of each component. Moreover, the evaluation of robustness and efficiency highlights the practicality of V2X-VLM for real-world deployment to enhance overall autonomous driving safety and decision-making.