Open-Ended Instruction Realization with LLM-Enabled Multi-Planner Scheduling in Autonomous Vehicles
Pith reviewed 2026-05-10 17:23 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
LLM-generated scripts schedule multiple MPC planners to convert open-ended passenger instructions into safe autonomous vehicle controls.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
The framework uses an LLM to interpret open-ended instructions and generate executable scheduling scripts that select and sequence multiple MPC-based motion planners on the basis of real-time feedback, thereby producing a transparent, traceable chain from high-level commands to low-level control signals. A closed-loop benchmark is introduced to evaluate this process. Experiments demonstrate improved task completion, reduced LLM query costs, safety and compliance comparable to specialized AD approaches, and substantial tolerance to LLM latency.
What carries the argument
LLM-enabled multi-planner scheduler that produces executable scripts to choose and switch among MPC motion planners based on real-time feedback.
Load-bearing premise
The introduced closed-loop benchmark is a sufficient proxy for the real-world challenges of open-ended instruction realization.
What would settle it
A demonstration, in either a higher-fidelity simulator or a real vehicle, that the framework fails to complete the same instructions at the reported rates or violates safety constraints that the benchmark claims are satisfied.
Figures
read the original abstract
Most Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) research overlooks the maneuvering needs of passengers in autonomous driving (AD). Natural language offers an intuitive interface, yet translating passenger open-ended instructions into control signals, without sacrificing interpretability and traceability, remains a challenge. This study proposes an instruction-realization framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) to interpret instructions, generates executable scripts that schedule multiple model predictive control (MPC)-based motion planners based on real-time feedback, and converts planned trajectories into control signals. This scheduling-centric design decouples semantic reasoning from vehicle control at different timescales, establishing a transparent, traceable decision-making chain from high-level instructions to low-level actions. Due to the absence of high-fidelity evaluation tools, this study introduces a benchmark for open-ended instruction realization in a closed-loop setting. Comprehensive experiments reveal that the framework significantly improves task-completion rates over instruction-realization baselines, reduces LLM query costs, achieves safety and compliance on par with specialized AD approaches, and exhibits considerable tolerance to LLM inference latency. For more qualitative illustrations and a clearer understanding.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes an instruction-realization framework for autonomous vehicles that uses an LLM to interpret open-ended passenger instructions, generates executable scripts to schedule multiple MPC-based motion planners in response to real-time feedback, and converts the resulting trajectories into control signals. The scheduling-centric architecture is intended to decouple semantic reasoning from low-level vehicle control at different timescales, yielding a transparent decision chain. Because no high-fidelity evaluation tools exist, the authors introduce a new closed-loop benchmark; experiments on this benchmark report higher task-completion rates than instruction-realization baselines, lower LLM query costs, safety and compliance comparable to specialized AD methods, and robustness to LLM inference latency.
Significance. If the benchmark faithfully captures the relevant vehicle dynamics, sensor noise, and instruction distributions, the work would offer a concrete, traceable route for integrating LLMs into safety-critical AD control loops without sacrificing interpretability. The explicit separation of timescales and the multi-planner scheduling mechanism are technically interesting contributions that could influence future HMI designs. The creation of an open benchmark also addresses a genuine evaluation gap, provided its representativeness can be established.
major comments (2)
- [§4] §4 (Benchmark and Evaluation Setup): All central performance claims—improved task-completion rates, reduced LLM costs, safety parity with specialized AD, and latency tolerance—are derived exclusively from experiments in the newly introduced closed-loop benchmark. The manuscript acknowledges the absence of high-fidelity tools yet supplies no quantitative validation (e.g., comparison of vehicle model order, tire/road friction, sensor noise statistics, or traffic density against real-world or high-fidelity simulator data) that the proxy reproduces the dynamics that would determine whether the reported gains transfer. This is load-bearing for every experimental conclusion.
- [§5.3] §5.3 (Comparative Experiments): The paper states that the framework “significantly improves task-completion rates over instruction-realization baselines,” but the results section does not report statistical significance tests, confidence intervals, or the number of independent runs per condition. Without these, it is impossible to determine whether the observed differences are robust or could be artifacts of the particular benchmark scenarios.
minor comments (2)
- [§3] The abstract and §3 would benefit from an explicit statement of the MPC cost functions and constraint sets used by the individual planners; this would clarify how safety and compliance are enforced at the low level.
- [Figure 2] Figure 2 (system architecture) caption should indicate the exact interface between the generated script and the real-time feedback loop (e.g., which state variables are passed back to the LLM scheduler).
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the detailed and constructive feedback on our manuscript. We address each major comment point by point below, indicating the revisions we will incorporate where appropriate.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [§4] §4 (Benchmark and Evaluation Setup): All central performance claims—improved task-completion rates, reduced LLM costs, safety parity with specialized AD, and latency tolerance—are derived exclusively from experiments in the newly introduced closed-loop benchmark. The manuscript acknowledges the absence of high-fidelity tools yet supplies no quantitative validation (e.g., comparison of vehicle model order, tire/road friction, sensor noise statistics, or traffic density against real-world or high-fidelity simulator data) that the proxy reproduces the dynamics that would determine whether the reported gains transfer. This is load-bearing for every experimental conclusion.
Authors: We acknowledge that the benchmark serves as a proxy and that direct quantitative validation against real-world or high-fidelity data would strengthen transferability claims. As noted in the manuscript, high-fidelity tools are unavailable, which is why this benchmark was introduced. In the revision, we will expand §4 to include explicit parameter values and sources for the vehicle model (nonlinear bicycle model with Pacejka tire parameters from standard literature), sensor noise statistics (Gaussian variances drawn from typical AD sensor specs), and traffic scenario distributions (sampled to match NGSIM-like densities). A new limitations subsection will discuss assumptions and expected generalization conditions. However, performing side-by-side quantitative comparisons to inaccessible high-fidelity simulators or real-vehicle logs is not feasible within current resources. revision: partial
-
Referee: [§5.3] §5.3 (Comparative Experiments): The paper states that the framework “significantly improves task-completion rates over instruction-realization baselines,” but the results section does not report statistical significance tests, confidence intervals, or the number of independent runs per condition. Without these, it is impossible to determine whether the observed differences are robust or could be artifacts of the particular benchmark scenarios.
Authors: We agree that statistical rigor is necessary. The revised manuscript will state that all conditions were evaluated over 20 independent runs using distinct random seeds for instruction generation, initial states, and disturbances. We will report 95% confidence intervals for task-completion rates, LLM query costs, and safety metrics, along with p-values from appropriate tests (paired t-tests for normally distributed metrics or Wilcoxon signed-rank tests otherwise). These additions will appear in §5.3 and the corresponding tables. revision: yes
- Direct quantitative validation of benchmark dynamics (model order, friction, noise, traffic) against real-world or high-fidelity simulator data, as no such accessible tools exist and obtaining them would require resources beyond the scope of this study.
Circularity Check
No circularity; experimental claims rest on introduced benchmark without reduction to inputs or self-citations
full rationale
The paper describes an LLM-based multi-planner scheduling framework for instruction realization in autonomous vehicles and reports empirical improvements from experiments in a newly introduced closed-loop benchmark. No equations, derivations, fitted parameters renamed as predictions, or load-bearing self-citations appear in the provided text that would reduce the claimed task-completion rates, cost reductions, or safety parity to the inputs by construction. The benchmark is explicitly motivated by the acknowledged absence of high-fidelity tools rather than being defined in terms of the results it produces. Per the hard rules, concerns about benchmark fidelity fall under external validity rather than circularity, as no self-referential reduction is exhibited.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Carplay ultra, the next generation of carplay, begins rolling out today, 2025
Apple, Inc. Carplay ultra, the next generation of carplay, begins rolling out today, 2025. Accessed: 2025-05-15. 1
work page 2025
-
[2]
Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Hengshuai Yao, and Randy Goebel. Explainable artificial intelligence for autonomous driving: A comprehensive overview and field guide for future research directions.IEEE Access, 2024. 3
work page 2024
-
[3]
Yougang Bian, Jieyun Ding, Manjiang Hu, Qing Xu, Jian- qiang Wang, and Keqiang Li. An advanced lane-keeping assistance system with switchable assistance modes.IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 21(1): 385–396, 2020. 1
work page 2020
-
[4]
nuscenes: A multi- modal dataset for autonomous driving
Holger Caesar, Varun Bankiti, Alex H Lang, Sourabh V ora, Venice Erin Liong, Qiang Xu, Anush Krishnan, Yu Pan, Gi- ancarlo Baldan, and Oscar Beijbom. nuscenes: A multi- modal dataset for autonomous driving. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 11621–11631, 2020. 2
work page 2020
-
[5]
Argoverse: 3d tracking and forecasting with rich maps
Ming-Fang Chang, John Lambert, Patsorn Sangkloy, Jag- jeet Singh, Slawomir Bak, Andrew Hartnett, De Wang, Peter Carr, Simon Lucey, Deva Ramanan, et al. Argoverse: 3d tracking and forecasting with rich maps. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 8748–8757, 2019. 2
work page 2019
-
[6]
Omnire: Omni urban scene reconstruction
Ziyu Chen, Jiawei Yang, Jiahui Huang, Riccardo de Lutio, Janick Martinez Esturo, Boris Ivanovic, Or Litany, Zan Goj- cic, Sanja Fidler, Marco Pavone, et al. Omnire: Omni urban scene reconstruction. InThe Thirteenth International Con- ference on Learning Representations, 2025. 8
work page 2025
-
[7]
Li auto unveils next-gen au- tonomous driving architecture mindvla, 2025
China Automotive News. Li auto unveils next-gen au- tonomous driving architecture mindvla, 2025. Accessed: 2025-05-18. 1
work page 2025
-
[8]
Personalized autonomous driving with large lan- guage models: Field experiments
Can Cui, Zichong Yang, Yupeng Zhou, Yunsheng Ma, Juanwu Lu, Lingxi Li, Yaobin Chen, Jitesh Panchal, and Zi- ran Wang. Personalized autonomous driving with large lan- guage models: Field experiments. In2024 IEEE 27th Inter- national Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), pages 20–27, 2024. 4
work page 2024
-
[9]
Erfei Cui, Wenhai Wang, Zhiqi Li, Jiangwei Xie, Haoming Zou, Hanming Deng, Gen Luo, Lewei Lu, Xizhou Zhu, and Jifeng Dai. Drivemlm: aligning multi-modal large language models with behavioral planning states for autonomous driv- ing.Visual Intelligence, 3(22), 2025. 4
work page 2025
-
[10]
Parting with misconceptions about learning- based vehicle motion planning
Daniel Dauner, Marcel Hallgarten, Andreas Geiger, and Kashyap Chitta. Parting with misconceptions about learning- based vehicle motion planning. InProceedings of the Con- ference on Robot Learning, pages 1268–1281, 2023. 6
work page 2023
-
[11]
Deepseek-v3 technical report, 2025
DeepSeek-AI and et al. Deepseek-v3 technical report, 2025. 6
work page 2025
-
[12]
Carla: An open urban driving simulator
Alexey Dosovitskiy, German Ros, Felipe Codevilla, Antonio Lopez, and Vladlen Koltun. Carla: An open urban driving simulator. InProceedings of the Conference on Robot Learn- ing, pages 1–16. PMLR, 2017. 2
work page 2017
-
[13]
Cooperative driving us- ing a hierarchy of mixed-integer programming and tracking control
Jan Eilbrecht and Olaf Stursberg. Cooperative driving us- ing a hierarchy of mixed-integer programming and tracking control. In2017 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), pages 673–678, 2017. 4
work page 2017
-
[14]
LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models
Senyu Fei, Siyin Wang, Junhao Shi, Zihao Dai, Jikun Cai, Pengfang Qian, Li Ji, Xinzhe He, Shiduo Zhang, Zhaoye Fei, et al. Libero-plus: In-depth robustness analysis of vision- language-action models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13626,
work page internal anchor Pith review arXiv
-
[15]
Tsang, Ming-Ming Cheng, and Qing Guo
Yuxiang Fu, Jiakun Ding, Renzhi Wang, Qian Fu, Ivor W. Tsang, Ming-Ming Cheng, and Qing Guo. Benchmark- ing drag*for eye direction transformation and beyond.Visual Intelligence, 3(29), 2025. 8
work page 2025
-
[16]
Xun Gong, Jieyu Wang, Baolin Ma, Liang Lu, Yunfeng Hu, and Hong Chen. Real-time integrated power and thermal management of connected hevs based on hierarchical model predictive control.IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatron- ics, 26(3):1271–1282, 2021. 3
work page 2021
-
[17]
Mak- ing large language models better planners with reasoning- decision alignment
Zhijian Huang, Tao Tang, Shaoxiang Chen, Sihao Lin, Ze- qun Jie, Lin Ma, Guangrun Wang, and Xiaodan Liang. Mak- ing large language models better planners with reasoning- decision alignment. InEuropean Conference on Computer Vision, pages 73–90, 2024. 3
work page 2024
-
[18]
Bo Jiang, Shaoyu Chen, Qian Zhang, Wenyu Liu, and Xing- gang Wang. Alphadrive: Unleashing the power of vlms in autonomous driving via reinforcement learning and reason- ing.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.07608, 2025. 3
work page internal anchor Pith review arXiv 2025
-
[19]
A survey on vision-language- action models for autonomous driving, 2025
Sicong Jiang, Zilin Huang, Kangan Qian, Ziang Luo, Tianze Zhu, Yang Zhong, Yihong Tang, Menglin Kong, Yunlong Wang, Siwen Jiao, Hao Ye, Zihao Sheng, Xin Zhao, Tuopu Wen, Zheng Fu, Sikai Chen, Kun Jiang, Diange Yang, Seongjin Choi, and Lijun Sun. A survey on vision-language- action models for autonomous driving, 2025. 1, 3
work page 2025
-
[20]
Towards learning- based planning: The nuplan benchmark for real-world au- tonomous driving
Napat Karnchanachari, Dimitris Geromichalos, Kok Seang Tan, Nanxiang Li, Christopher Eriksen, Shakiba Yaghoubi, Noushin Mehdipour, Gianmarco Bernasconi, Whye Kit Fong, Yiluan Guo, and Holger Caesar. Towards learning- based planning: The nuplan benchmark for real-world au- tonomous driving. In2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (I...
work page 2024
-
[21]
Petar V Kokotovic, Robert E O’Malley Jr, and Peddapullaiah Sannuti. Singular perturbations and order reduction in con- trol theory—an overview.Automatica, 12(2):123–132, 1976. 3
work page 1976
-
[22]
An environment for autonomous driving decision-making, 2018
Edouard Leurent. An environment for autonomous driving decision-making, 2018. 2
work page 2018
-
[23]
Jiawei Liu, Yanjiao Liu, Xun Gong, Tingting Wang, Hong Chen, and Yunfeng Hu. Harnessing and evaluating the intrin- sic extrapolation ability of large language models for vehicle trajectory prediction. InProceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (V...
work page 2025
-
[24]
Yuechen Luo, Fang Li, Shaoqing Xu, Zhiyi Lai, Lei Yang, Qimao Chen, Ziang Luo, Zixun Xie, Shengyin Jiang, Ji- axin Liu, et al. Adathinkdrive: Adaptive thinking via rein- forcement learning for autonomous driving.arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.13769, 2025. 3
-
[25]
Doaa Mahmud, Hadeel Hajmohamed, Shamma Almentheri, Shamma Alqaydi, Lameya Aldhaheri, Ruhul Amin Khalil, and Nasir Saeed. Integrating llms with its: Recent advances, potentials, challenges, and future directions.IEEE Trans- actions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 26(5):5674– 5709, 2025. 1, 2, 5
work page 2025
-
[26]
Ana L ´ucia De Moura and Roberto Ierusalimschy. Revisiting coroutines.ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), 31(2):1–31, 2009. 2
work page 2009
-
[27]
Eda Okur, Shachi H Kumar, Saurav Sahay, Asli Ar- slan Esme, and Lama Nachman. Natural language interac- tions in autonomous vehicles: Intent detection and slot fill- ing from passenger utterances. InInternational Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Process- ing, pages 334–350. Springer, 2019. 2
work page 2019
-
[28]
Arjun Panickssery, Samuel Bowman, and Shi Feng. Llm evaluators recognize and favor their own generations.Ad- vances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37: 68772–68802, 2024. 6
work page 2024
-
[29]
Conditional driving from natural language instructions
Junha Roh, Chris Paxton, Andrzej Pronobis, Ali Farhadi, and Dieter Fox. Conditional driving from natural language instructions. InProceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning, pages 540–551, 2020. 2
work page 2020
-
[30]
Languagempc: Large language models as decision makers for autonomous driving, 2025
Hao Sha, Yao Mu, Yuxuan Jiang, Li Chen, Chenfeng Xu, Ping Luo, Shengbo Eben Li, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan, and Mingyu Ding. Languagempc: Large language models as decision makers for autonomous driving, 2025. 4
work page 2025
-
[31]
Lmdrive: Closed-loop end-to-end driving with large language models
Hao Shao, Yuxuan Hu, Letian Wang, Guanglu Song, Steven L Waslander, Yu Liu, and Hongsheng Li. Lmdrive: Closed-loop end-to-end driving with large language models. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 15120–15130, 2024. 3
work page 2024
-
[32]
Paulo Tabuada. Event-triggered real-time scheduling of sta- bilizing control tasks.IEEE Transactions on Automatic con- trol, 52(9):1680–1685, 2007. 3
work page 2007
-
[33]
Mingtian Tan, Mike Merrill, Vinayak Gupta, Tim Althoff, and Tom Hartvigsen. Are language models actually useful for time series forecasting?Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37:60162–60191, 2024. 5
work page 2024
-
[34]
Spatial routines for a simu- lated speech-controlled vehicle
Stefanie Tellex and Deb Roy. Spatial routines for a simu- lated speech-controlled vehicle. InProceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interac- tion, pages 156–163, 2006. 2
work page 2006
-
[35]
Stefanie Tellex, Nakul Gopalan, Hadas Kress-Gazit, and Cynthia Matuszek. Robots that use language.Annual Re- view of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, 3(1): 25–55, 2020. 2
work page 2020
-
[36]
Tesla model 3 owner’s manual, 2025
Tesla, Inc. Tesla model 3 owner’s manual, 2025. Accessed:
work page 2025
-
[37]
Global technology: China’s robotaxi market - the road to commercialization, 2025
The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Global technology: China’s robotaxi market - the road to commercialization, 2025. Ac- cessed: 2025-05-15. 1
work page 2025
-
[38]
Martin Treiber, Ansgar Hennecke, and Dirk Helbing. Con- gested traffic states in empirical observations and micro- scopic simulations.Physical review E, 62(2):1805, 2000. 6
work page 2000
-
[39]
Jingyan Wan and Changxu Wu. The effects of lead time of take-over request and nondriving tasks on taking-over con- trol of automated vehicles.IEEE Transactions on Human- Machine Systems, 48(6):582–591, 2018. 1
work page 2018
-
[40]
Shiyi Wang, Yuxuan Zhu, Zhiheng Li, Yutong Wang, Li Li, and Zhengbing He. Chatgpt as your vehicle co-pilot: An initial attempt.IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, 8 (12):4706–4721, 2023. 4
work page 2023
-
[41]
Wenshuo Wang, Ding Zhao, Wei Han, and Junqiang Xi. A learning-based approach for lane departure warning systems with a personalized driver model.IEEE Transactions on Ve- hicular Technology, 67(10):9145–9157, 2018. 1
work page 2018
-
[42]
Yan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Junjie Bai, Yulong Cao, Tong Che, Ke Chen, Yuxiao Chen, Jenna Diamond, Yifan Ding, Wen- hao Ding, et al. Alpamayo-r1: Bridging reasoning and action prediction for generalizable autonomous driving in the long tail.arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.00088, 2025. 3
work page internal anchor Pith review arXiv 2025
-
[43]
Taylor Webb, Keith J Holyoak, and Hongjing Lu. Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models.Nature Hu- man Behaviour, 7(9):1526–1541, 2023. 4
work page 2023
-
[44]
Henry Weld, Xiaoqi Huang, Siqu Long, Josiah Poon, and Soyeon Caren Han. A survey of joint intent detection and slot filling models in natural language understanding.ACM Computing Surveys, 55(8):1–38, 2022. 3
work page 2022
-
[45]
Dilu: A knowledge-driven approach to autonomous driving with large language models
Licheng Wen, Daocheng Fu, Xin Li, Xinyu Cai, MA Tao, Pinlong Cai, Min Dou, Botian Shi, Liang He, and Yu Qiao. Dilu: A knowledge-driven approach to autonomous driving with large language models. InThe Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024. 3, 4, 6
work page 2024
-
[46]
Yang Xing, Chen Lv, Dongpu Cao, and Peng Hang. To- ward human-vehicle collaboration: Review and perspec- tives on human-centered collaborative automated driving. Transportation research part C: emerging technologies, 128: 103199, 2021. 1, 2
work page 2021
- [47]
-
[48]
Diffusion-es: Gradient-free planning with diffusion for autonomous and instruction-guided driving
Brian Yang, Huangyuan Su, Nikolaos Gkanatsios, Tsung- Wei Ke, Ayush Jain, Jeff Schneider, and Katerina Fragki- adaki. Diffusion-es: Gradient-free planning with diffusion for autonomous and instruction-guided driving. InProceed- ings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 15342–15353, 2024. 6
work page 2024
-
[49]
Ex- ploring compositional generalization of large language mod- els
Haoran Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Wai Lam, and Deng Cai. Ex- ploring compositional generalization of large language mod- els. InProceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Lin- guistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 16–24, 2024. 4
work page 2024
-
[50]
Deep open intent classification with adaptive decision boundary
Hanlei Zhang, Hua Xu, and Ting-En Lin. Deep open intent classification with adaptive decision boundary. InProceed- ings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 14374–14382, 2021. 3
work page 2021
-
[51]
Zhao, Yun Zhang, Zhiyu Huang, Bolei Zhou, and Jiaqi Ma
Zewei Zhou, Tianhui Cai, Seth Z. Zhao, Yun Zhang, Zhiyu Huang, Bolei Zhou, and Jiaqi Ma. Autovla: A vision- language-action model for end-to-end autonomous driving with adaptive reasoning and reinforcement fine-tuning, 2025. 3, 5
work page 2025
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.