Operating Within the Operational Design Domain: Zero-Shot Perception with Vision-Language Models
Researchers demonstrate that vision-language models (VLMs) can effectively function as zero-shot sensors for perceiving Operational Design Domains (ODDs) in autonomous systems without task-specific training. The study evaluates four VLMs on ODD classification and detection tasks, finding that chain-of-thought prompting with persona decomposition achieves optimal performance, providing a scalable approach for safety-critical autonomous driving applications.