Measuring the Reasoning-Action Coupling in Driving Vision-Language-Action Models through Counterfactuals

Abstract

Driving vision-language-action (VLA) models bring an appealing form of explainability to a safety-critical domain, since a system that can state the reasons for its maneuvers offers the transparency that deployment and public trust in autonomous driving demand. These models read the world into language before they act on it, describing the scene and reasoning over it in text that ranges from chain-of-thought to multi-stage question answering on the way to a trajectory. That framing quietly assumes two separable properties, namely that the trajectory follows the generated reasoning and that the generated reasoning tracks the causes that actually produce the trajectory. To thoroughly investigate these properties, we apply causal, counterfactual interventions to four driving VLAs across different benchmarks. First, we perturb the models' own reasoning and show that altering its meaning produces small trajectory changes relative to blanking the same models' camera inputs, a pattern that persists across benchmarks and model architectures. We then construct scene-level counterfactuals through photorealistic removal of key objects named in the models' reasoning and analyze whether the generated reasoning and trajectories track these changes. Overall, our findings indicate that the reasoning these models present to account for their resulting driving behavior is weakly coupled to that behavior itself, pointing to limits on the explainability these systems are intended to provide.