Challenges in Hyperspectral Imaging for Autonomous Driving: The HSI-Drive Case

End-to-end autonomous driving has witnessed rapid progress, yet existing benchmarks are increasingly saturated, with state-of-the-art models achieving near-perfect scores on widely used open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks. This saturation does not mean that the problem has been solved; instead, it reveals that current benchmarks remain limited in scenario diversity, object variety, and the breadth of driving capabilities they evaluate. In particular, they lack sufficient long-tail scenarios involving rare but safety-critical objects and fail to assess advanced decision-making such as legal compliance, ethical reasoning, and emergency response. To address these gaps, we propose HiDrive, a new closed-loop benchmark for end-to-end autonomous driving that emphasizes long-tail scenarios and a richer evaluation of driving capabilities. HiDrive introduces a diverse set of rare objects and uncommon traffic situations, and expands evaluation from basic driving skills to more advanced capabilities, including rule compliance, moral reasoning, and context-dependent emergency maneuvers. Correspondingly, we extend previous collision-avoidance-centered metrics into a comprehensive evaluation system that encompasses collision and braking, traffic-rule compliance, and moral-reasoning indicators. Built on a more advanced physics engine, HiDrive provides physically realistic lighting and high-fidelity visual rendering, offering a more challenging and realistic testbed for assessing whether autonomous driving systems can handle the complexity of real-world deployment. The HiDrive software, source code, digital assets, and documentation are available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/HiDrive.

The low-light conditions are challenging to the vision-centric perception systems for autonomous driving in the dark environment. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark dataset (named DarkDriving) to investigate the low-light enhancement for autonomous driving. The existing real-world low-light enhancement benchmark datasets can be collected by controlling various exposures only in small-ranges and static scenes. The dark images of the current nighttime driving datasets do not have the precisely aligned daytime counterparts. The extreme difficulty to collect a real-world day and night aligned dataset in the dynamic driving scenes significantly limited the research in this area. With a proposed automatic day-night Trajectory Tracking based Pose Matching (TTPM) method in a large real-world closed driving test field (area: 69 acres), we collected the first real-world day and night aligned dataset for autonomous driving in the dark environment. The DarkDriving dataset has 9,538 day and night image pairs precisely aligned in location and spatial contents, whose alignment error is in just several centimeters. For each pair, we also manually label the object 2D bounding boxes. DarkDriving introduces four perception related tasks, including low-light enhancement, generalized low-light enhancement, and low-light enhancement for 2D detection and 3D detection of autonomous driving in the dark environment. The experimental results show that our DarkDriving dataset provides a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating low-light enhancement for autonomous driving and it can also be generalized to enhance dark images and promote detection in some other low-light driving environment, such as nuScenes.The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/DriveMindLab/DarkDriving-ICRA-2026.

Spatiotemporal intelligence in autonomous driving (AD) requires an agent to integrate multi-view observations into a coherent scene representation, maintain object continuity across viewpoints and time, and reason about spatial relations, interactions, and future dynamics. However, existing AD vision-language benchmarks largely focus on single-view, static, ego-centric, or single-source question answering, leaving it unclear whether current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can truly construct and reason over dynamic driving scenes. We introduce DriveSpatial, a benchmark of 15.6K human-verified QA pairs across 20 tasks from five large-scale AD datasets. DriveSpatial evaluates four abilities: Cognitive Scene Construction, Multi-view Relational Understanding, Temporal Reasoning, and Generalization. Unlike prior benchmarks, DriveSpatial is generated from a dynamic multi-relational scene graph that encodes object states, spatial relations, interactions, camera visibility, and temporal correspondences, enabling QA pairs that enforce genuine cross-view and spatiotemporal reasoning. Evaluating 15 representative VLMs reveals a substantial human-model gap: the strongest model trails humans by 28.4 points, with Cognitive Scene Construction emerging as the key bottleneck. Further diagnostics show that language-only prompting is insufficient, while explicit BEV grounding consistently improves performance. These results suggest that current VLMs lack the scene-construction ability needed for reliable spatiotemporal driving intelligence. DriveSpatial and its construction pipeline will be released to support future research.