Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

NuScenes-SpatialQA: A Spatial Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2504.03164 v2 pith:MIYECSZL submitted 2025-04-04 cs.CV cs.AI

classification cs.CVcs.AI
keywords spatialvlmsautonomousbenchmarkdrivingreasoningunderstandingcapabilities
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for autonomous driving tasks. However, their spatial understanding and reasoning-key capabilities for autonomous driving-still exhibit significant limitations. Notably, none of the existing benchmarks systematically evaluate VLMs' spatial reasoning capabilities in driving scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose NuScenes-SpatialQA, the first large-scale ground-truth-based Question-Answer (QA) benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities of VLMs in autonomous driving. Built upon the NuScenes dataset, the benchmark is constructed through an automated 3D scene graph generation pipeline and a QA generation pipeline. The benchmark systematically evaluates VLMs' performance in both spatial understanding and reasoning across multiple dimensions. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse VLMs, including both general and spatial-enhanced models, providing the first comprehensive evaluation of their spatial capabilities in autonomous driving. Surprisingly, the experimental results show that the spatial-enhanced VLM outperforms in qualitative QA but does not demonstrate competitiveness in quantitative QA. In general, VLMs still face considerable challenges in spatial understanding and reasoning.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Deferred Exposure of Future Trajectories for Verifiable Reasoning in Autonomous Driving VLMs

    cs.AI 2026-08 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Hiding future trajectory information until after a driving model forms its decision reduces rationalization and improves verifiable autonomous-driving reasoning in the proposed AD-MCQ and DEFT-RLVR framework.

  2. MonoSR: Open-Vocabulary Spatial Reasoning from Monocular Images

    cs.CV 2025-11 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    MonoSR is a 1M-question benchmark for spatial reasoning from single photos across indoor, outdoor, and object-centric scenes; current VLMs score roughly 30-40%, and giving models 3D box coordinates lifts them near perfect.

  3. STSBench: A Spatio-temporal Scenario Benchmark for Multi-modal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A new benchmark, STSnu, uses 971 verified multiple-choice questions from NuScenes to test driving vision-language models' spatio-temporal reasoning, and shows they lag far behind text-only LLMs given perfect trajectories.

  4. Understanding Space Is Rocket Science -- Only Top Reasoning Models Can Solve Spatial Understanding Tasks

    cs.CV 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new contrastive real-image benchmark shows most vision-language models fail spatial relation tasks, while chain-of-thought reasoning models approach human-level accuracy.

  5. AD^2-Bench: A Hierarchical CoT Benchmark for MLLM in Autonomous Driving under Adverse Conditions

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    AD^2-Bench is a new adverse-weather driving benchmark with hierarchical chain-of-thought annotations and LLM-based quality metrics; 12 MLLMs all scored below 60%.

  6. Automated Vehicles Should be Connected with Natural Language

    cs.MA 2025-06 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A vision paper recommending natural language as the universal communication medium for connected and automated vehicles.

Pith tools