DriveGPT4-V2: Harnessing Large Language Model Capabilities for Enhanced Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) possess the ability to comprehend visual images or videos, and show impressive reasoning ability thanks to the vast amounts of pretrained knowledge, making them highly suitable for autonomous driving applications. Unlike the previous work, DriveGPT4-V1, which focused on open-loop tasks, this study explores the capabilities of LLMs in enhancing closed-loop autonomous driving. DriveGPT4-V2 processes camera images and vehicle states as input to generate low-level control signals for end-to-end vehicle operation. A high-resolution visual tokenizer (HR-VT) is employed enabling DriveGPT4-V2 to perceive the environment with an extensive range while maintaining critical details. The model architecture has been refined to improve decision prediction and inference speed. To further enhance the performance, an additional expert LLM is trained for online imitation learning. The expert LLM, sharing a similar structure with DriveGPT4-V2, can access privileged information about surrounding objects for more robust and reliable predictions. Experimental results show that DriveGPT4-V2 significantly outperforms all baselines on the challenging CARLA Longest6 benchmark. The code and data of DriveGPT4-V2 will be publicly available.