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

Kexin Tian, Jingrui Mao, Yunlong Zhang, Jiwan Jiang, Yang Zhou +1 more
4/4/2025
cs.CVcs.AI

No confident code implementation found for this paper. 1 possible match can be shown below.

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.

View on arXivView PDF

Code Implementations

No confident code match yet

We couldn't find an author-owned or strongly-evidenced community implementation for this paper. 1 weaker match is hidden by default — verify before relying on them.

No code implementations found yet.

Know of an implementation? Let us know in the comments below!

Similar Papers

Cite this paper

@article{tian2025nuscenesspatialqa,
  title  = {NuScenes-SpatialQA: A Spatial Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving},
  author = {Kexin Tian and Jingrui Mao and Yunlong Zhang and Jiwan Jiang and Yang Zhou and Zhengzhong Tu},
  year   = {2025},
  eprint = {2504.03164},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03164v2}
}

Add a badge to your README

Shows whether official code is linked for this paper.

Code of Paper badge
[![Code of Paper](https://codeofpaper.com/badge/2504.03164.svg)](https://codeofpaper.com/paper/2504.03164)

Discussion