# Efficient Visual Question Answering Pipeline for Autonomous Driving via Scene Region Compression Source: [Efficient Visual Question Answering Pipeline for Autonomous Driving via Scene Region Compression]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-01-14T05:00:12.520Z Authors: Yuliang Cai, Dongqiangzi Ye, Zitian Chen, Chongruo Wu Published: 2026-01-11T23:25:49.000Z ## Abstract Autonomous driving increasingly relies on Visual Question Answering (VQA) to enable vehicles to understand complex surroundings by analyzing visual inputs and textual queries. Currently, a paramount concern for VQA in this domain is the stringent requirement for fast latency and real-time processing, as delays directly impact real-world safety in this safety-critical application. However, current state-of-the-art VQA models, particularly large vision-language models (VLMs), often prioritize performance over computational efficiency. These models typically process dense patch tokens for every frame, leading to prohibitive computational costs (FLOPs) and significant inference latency, especially with long video sequences. This focus limits their practical deployment in real-time autonomous driving scenarios. To tackle this issue, we propose an efficient VLM framework for autonomous driving VQA tasks, SRC-Pipeline. It learns to compress early frame tokens into a small number of high-level tokens while retaining full patch tokens for recent frames. Experiments on autonomous driving video question answering tasks show that our approach achieves 66% FLOPs reduction while maintaining comparable performance, enabling VLMs to operate more effectively in real-time, safety-critical autonomous driving settings. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Video Question Answering on LingoQA (test)](): Video Question Answering; LingoQA (test); Ling-Judge: 59.1. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()