ScopeDrive: Text-Anchored Cross-Modal Calibration and Density-Aware Modulation for Autonomous Driving

Hou, Minghui, Wang, Gang, Guan, Runwei, Liu, Jianan, Huang, Tao, and Han, Qing Long (2026) ScopeDrive: Text-Anchored Cross-Modal Calibration and Density-Aware Modulation for Autonomous Driving. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 22 (8). pp. 7124-7135.

[img] PDF (Published Version) - Published Version
Restricted to Repository staff only

View at Publisher Website: https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2026.3683432
 
3


Abstract

Vision–language models are emerging as a unified paradigm for perception, prediction, and planning in autonomous driving. However, most existing approaches still rely on shallow fusion between visual and textual features, leading to weak cross-modal interaction, feature drift, and poor adaptability in complex scenes. This work present ScopeDrive, an end-to-end VLM framework that enables deep semantic alignment and adaptive reasoning through two novel components. The text-anchored calibrator transforms textual semantics into multiscale anchors that progressively calibrate visual features across layers, strengthening cross-modal correspondence. The density-aware agent modulator estimates scene complexity and dynamically adjusts attention distribution, allowing the model to focus on dense or dynamic regions when needed. Evaluated on the DriveLM, DriveBench, and NuScenes-QA benchmarks, ScopeDrive surpasses both lightweight and large-scale baselines, achieving a BLEU-4 of 53.27 and METEOR of 38.75 on DriveLM while maintaining only 328 M parameters. It also delivers state-of-the-art performance on perception and planning tasks under both clean and corrupted conditions. These results demonstrate that ScopeDrive effectively breaks the shallow-fusion barrier, offering a lightweight yet semantically aligned foundation for interpretable autonomous-driving intelligence.

Item ID: 91775
Item Type: Article (Refereed Research - C1)
ISSN: 1941-0050
Keywords: Autonomous driving, cross-modal fusion, vision–language models (VLMs)
Copyright Information: © 2026 IEEE. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining, and training of artificial intelligence and similar technologies.
Date Deposited: 24 Aug 2026 04:50
FoR Codes: 46 INFORMATION AND COMPUTING SCIENCES > 4602 Artificial intelligence > 460201 Artificial life and complex adaptive systems @ 100%
SEO Codes: 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280110 Expanding knowledge in engineering @ 100%
Downloads: Total: 3
Last 12 Months: 3
More Statistics

Actions (Repository Staff Only)

Item Control Page Item Control Page