DRIVINGVQA: A Dataset for Interleaved Visual Chain-of-Thought in Real-World Driving Scenarios

AbstractWhile chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models, its effectiveness in vision-language models (VLMs) remains limited due to over-reliance on textual cues and memorized knowledge. To investigate the visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs in complex real-world scenarios, we introduce DrivingVQA, a visual question answering dataset derived from driving theory exams, which contains 3,931 multiple-choice problems with expert-written explanations and grounded entities relevant to the reasoning process. Leveraging this dataset, we explore the benefits of incorporating entity-related information, such as entity names, spatial coordinates, and visual content, through supervised fine-tuning to enhance the model’s reasoning abilities. Our experiments demonstrate that interleaving textual explanations with visual tokens extracted from entities relevant to the question improves answer accuracy by 3.1% and reasoning accuracy by 4.6% over vanilla CoT prompting. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this retrieval-based approach effectively scales to the larger A-OKVQA reasoning dataset by leveraging automatically generated pseudo-labels, outperforming CoT prompting.