LLM-Driven Autonomous Vehicles Inherit Human Driver Biases in Pedestrian Yielding: Results and Implications From A New Benchmark

2026-08-31

AI Summary

研究使用两种新方法测试大型语言模型和视觉-语言模型在行人让行决策中的偏见，发现这些模型继承了人类驾驶员基于性别、种族等因素的偏见。

Abstract

Public trust in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) may depend not only on technical success but also on the fairness of their decision making. While a recent trend in AV research involves using general purpose "common sense" models to guide AV decision making, the degree to which these inherit human biases in driving is still understudied. Given that psychology studies have shown human driver biases exist, such as lower pedestrian-yielding rates to Black pedestrians in the US, we argue that analyses of model bias should also be part of AV evaluation. Concretely, in this paper we propose two new bias testing methodologies for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual-Language Models (VLMs)-"All Else Being Equal" tests and "Self-Consistency" tests-in order to assess bias in pedestrian-yielding decisions. Our findings show that both LLMs and VLMs make yielding decisions which are influenced by pedestrian gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, skin tone and socio-economic status. While the type and degree of bias is different from model to model, we highlight common patterns-and raise questions about the "common sense" model paradigm, particularly the need to either revise the paradigm or address issues of downstream bias.

Problem

• Autonomous Vehicles
• Human Driver Biases
• Pedestrian Yielding
• Large Language Models
• Visual-Language Models

Innovation

• bias testing methodologies
• pedestrian-yielding decisions
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Visual-Language Models (VLMs)