Autonomous Driving Datasets

Latest papers 80

Oct 5, 2026cs.RO

Odyssey: A Closed-Loop Benchmark for Long-Horizon Real-World Driving with Explicit Navigation Routes

Closed-loop evaluation of end-to-end driving requires continuous rollouts that reveal how earlier decisions affect subsequent driving. However, existing benchmarks evaluate only short segments and fail to capture later consequences. Ambiguous directional commands also obscure the intended navigation objective. We introduce Odyssey, a closed-loop benchmark for long-horizon driving comprising 100 scenarios, each reconstructed from a 100-second nuPlan driving log to preserve the context of navigation maneuvers and traffic interactions. To provide a consistent navigation objective, Odyssey replaces directional commands with explicit standard-definition (SD) map routes that specify which roads to follow, while sensor-based planning determines local driving actions. Throughout these rollouts, diffusion-based refinement of 3DGS-rendered images reduces rendering artifacts along the ego trajectory. To assess how effectively planners follow these routes and prepare for upcoming maneuvers, we introduce SD Route Compliance and Pre-Lane Change Score. These assessments are complemented by RouteDS, which extends the Driving Score with penalties for SD-route deviations and failed lane preparation. We adapt state-of-the-art planners, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, and evaluate their navigation performance using these metrics. Odyssey highlights open questions in route representation and integration for E2E driving. Benchmark code and adapted baselines will be released publicly.
Oct 4, 2026cs.RO

Building A Multi-Sensor Platform For Autonomous Driving Research: Challenges and Lessons Learned

This paper reports on the challenges encountered and lessons learned during the development and deployment of a flexible multi-sensor platform for autonomous driving research. It aims to serve as a reference for researchers developing new multi-sensor systems. As the need for reliable, diverse datasets increases, novel environments and sensing configurations are essential to tackle real-world operational challenges. Consequently, many research groups create custom multi-sensory data collection platforms, where fundamental issues, such as mechanical design, sensor calibration, power management, and time synchronization, arise regardless of sensor types. We reflect on these challenges and share key insights to guide future platform designs, enhancing reproducibility and robustness in autonomous vehicle testing. We also summarize the mitigation strategies we adopted, for instance, system-wide time synchronization using GNSS timing and NTP protocols, custom calibration routines for different sensor configurations, and design practices to improve reliability and data integrity during field deployments.
Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

doPlan: A Variable-Horizon Dataset for Multi-Stage Language-Conditioned Planning in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles interacting with passengers through natural language must reason beyond immediate commands. Passenger intent may span multiple stages of behavior, depend on future events, refer to surrounding agents or landmarks, and remain relevant as driving conditions evolve. Existing language-enabled driving datasets largely focus on short, localized interactions, leaving these longer-horizon forms of passenger intent comparatively underexplored. We introduce doPlan, to our knowledge the first publicly available, human-annotated real-world dataset designed to study passenger language as persistent task context. Built on nuPlan, doPlan contains 5,154 human-written passenger instructions spanning 169.1 hours of cumulative instruction-aligned context over 50.9 hours of unique driving, with annotation windows ranging from 30.0 to 508.8 s. The annotations capture immediate, deferred, event-conditioned, persistent, and multi-stage passenger intent. The dataset, annotation interface, and supporting resources are publicly available at https://github.com/Mi3-Lab/doPlan. We evaluate four language-conditioned driving models and find that sensitivity to passenger language does not reliably translate into behavior consistent with the requested direction. More broadly, among 2,161 examples with a matched future maneuver, the first associated maneuver occurs a median of 24.6 s after the evaluation point, and only 9.8% occur within the models' common 5 s prediction horizon. These findings highlight the need to connect persistent passenger intent with successive planning decisions. doPlan provides a setting for studying how unresolved goals can be retained, grounded in evolving scenes, and tracked across multiple stages, including how a planner determines when a future goal becomes relevant to the current plan.
Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

AnchorReasoning: A Visual Grounding and Causal Reasoning Dataset in Long-Tail Autonomous Driving Scenarios

Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to long-tail autonomous driving, but existing driving datasets provide limited supervision for connecting decision-critical visual evidence with reasoning and planning. We introduce AnchorReasoning, a visually grounded reasoning dataset built on WOD-E2E, containing 416,119 annotated frames and 395,379 decision-critical elements across four major categories and 19 fine-grained types. Each frame is organized as a visually grounded chain-of-thought (VG-CoT) that links decision-critical element identification and localization, element attributes and implications, driving-action rationale, and action and trajectory planning. We further develop a curriculum supervised fine-tuning strategy that progressively learns these hierarchical capabilities, together with an object-size-aware grounding metric for evaluating localization quality. Experiments across eight general-purpose, embodied-AI, and AV-specific backbones show that VG-CoT supervision improves grounded reasoning and trajectory prediction. Across models, 5-s ADE and FDE decrease by 7.84 and 11.86, while RFS Frame and Cluster improve by 1.66 and 1.70. These gains are achieved with 18.5 fewer reasoning tokens and 0.32 s/frame lower inference latency on average, demonstrating the value of visually grounded, decision-focused supervision for VLM reasoning and planning in long-tail autonomous driving.
Sep 16, 2026cs.CV

WZPlanner: Safe End-to-End Path Planning for Autonomous Driving in Work Zones

Work zones alter lane geometry through temporary traffic controls and closures that may be absent from on-board maps, challenging autonomous vehicle (AV) perception and planning. Generalization is also limited by scarce public datasets with structured geometric supervision. We present WorkZonePlan, a dataset comprising 149K+ synthetic and 5K+ real-world multimodal samples with 3D annotations for lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectory options. It also provides 76 closed-loop CARLA scenarios replayed under three weather conditions, yielding 228 Bench2Drive-format evaluation routes. We introduce WAVE (Work-zone-focused AV data generation in Virtual and rEal Environments), a semi-automated pipeline for creating the dataset, and BoundaryFormer (BF), a transformer-based model that jointly predicts lane and work zone boundary polynomials and driving trajectories. BF uses slot attention for boundary prediction. Ablations show that a separate trajectory decoder using boundary slot features substantially improves trajectory prediction over a slot-attention-only approach. Building on this finding, BF++ offers Camera and Camera+LiDAR variants with metric ground-plane encoding, typed boundary/trajectory queries, long-range point anchors, image-space curve refinement, and conservative gated LiDAR fusion. On the 211 routes common to all four models at the evaluation freeze, BF++-Camera and BF++-Camera+LiDAR achieve Driving Scores of 63.0 and 64.4, respectively, compared with 59.3 for SimLingo and 26.1 for TransFuser++ (TF++). BF++ is 40 times smaller than SimLingo and more than 10 times smaller than TF++, while achieving higher Driving Scores. These results support jointly predicting lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectories as a promising direction toward safer AV operation in work zones. Code and dataset: https://github.com/Nishad-Sahu/WZPlanner.
Sep 15, 2026cs.CV

NeuroSymbEAD: A Large Scale Neuro-Symbolic Caption Dataset for Omni-Directional Embodied Autonomous Driving

This paper introduces NeuroSymbEAD, a large-scale neuro-symbolic caption dataset featuring an ego-centric knowledge graph (KG) of static and dynamic objects annotated with classes, categories, heading directions, orientations, and distances from the ego-vehicle. These annotations are used on the KITTI-360 dataset to generate multilevel textual captions representing a lightweight version of an ego-centric scene map. Outdoor scene-map reconstruction, visual recognition, and object grounding establish baselines for driving common sense and traffic/scene understanding. For these purposes, natural language-based grounded captioning of objects and their complex relationships is a widely adopted contextual representation for indoor scene tasks. Neuro-symbolic representations have proven effective in handling structured information for various computer vision and language applications. Our data annotation pipeline allows the generation of varied map segments, populating simulated or real objects within the bounding boxes predicted by any 3D object detection network, and building hierarchical text captions. We benchmark our neuro-symbolic and ontological caption generation using pre-trained grounding and learned auto-regressive captioning networks. By converting 3D driving scenes into structured ego-centric language, NeuroSymbEAD provides a benchmark for vision-language and foundation models for traffic-scene explanation, 3D reasoning, and interpretable autonomous-driving perception.
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

GRAVA: Grounded Reasoning-to-Action Representation and Learning for Autonomous Driving

Driving vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly reason before acting, but their intermediate reasoning is often weakly grounded in physical scene evidence and loosely connected to executable behavior. We present GRAVA, a framework built around Grounded Reasoning-to-Action (GRA), which unifies grounding, reasoning, and action generation in a single autoregressive stream. GRA links action-relevant language references to 2D visual regions and ego-centric physical states, organizes object interactions and decisions in a trajectory-anchored typed graph, and serializes this structure into grounded reasoning. A single VLM generates this reasoning followed by a compact Executable Planner action that is deterministically decoded into a continuous trajectory. We further introduce an agentic GRA data construction pipeline that combines forward scene grounding with backward trajectory anchoring, and use it to build GR-NavSim with 2.2M grounded question-answer pairs and 70K GRA reasoning traces. A progressive training strategy develops grounded cognition through pre-training, establishes the reasoning-to-action interface through imitation, and improves driving behavior through reinforcement learning and exploration. Using about 60% of the available human driving demonstrations for action supervision, GRAVA-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance among purely autoregressive driving models on the full NAVSIM benchmark. On an internal long-tail benchmark, full GRA improves key-object compliance and Closed-loop Driving Score by 19.3% and 20.5% over action-only prediction, respectively. These results show the benefit of preserving action-relevant physical evidence from grounded reasoning through executable action generation.
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

A Multi-Vehicle Dataset with Camera, LiDAR, and Radar Sensors and Scanned 3D Models for Custom Auto-Annotation using RTK-GNSS

Datasets are a crucial element in the development of perception algorithms. They relate sensor measurement data to annotated reference information and allow for the deduction of sensor and object characteristics. In autonomous driving, the reference data commonly consist of semantic image segmentation, point-wise associations, or bounding box annotations. The dataset proposed in this work, however, aims to dig deeper into the evaluation of measurement principles and provides scanned 3D models of all vehicles together with a pose and continuous kinematics reference obtained by RTK-GNSS. Combined, the state of the complete dynamic surrounding of the sensor vehicle is known for any point in time. Subsequent reference formats can be easily computed in user-defined granularity. This dataset involves single-object and multi-object recordings with seven target vehicles. In particular, measurement effects such as occlusion, as well as reflections, can be evaluated, as the normals of the shape of the target vehicles are known. We describe the dataset, discuss the technical background of its development, and briefly present exemplary evaluations.
Sep 8, 2026cs.CV

DriveMotion: A Large-Scale Multi-Source Benchmark for Driver Motion Sequence Modeling and Forecasting

Driver motion can provide cues to ongoing behavior, attention, and near-term driving intent. However, most existing driver-centric datasets focus on recognizing predefined driver behaviors from short video clips, while human motion forecasting benchmarks largely target motion outside the vehicle. We introduce DriveMotion, a multi-source benchmark for continuous driver motion forecasting. DriveMotion contains 393 hours of 133-keypoint motion sequences at 10 Hz from 360 drivers, integrating naturalistic driving data, curated public in-cabin videos, and the AIDE dataset into a unified representation with per-joint validity masks and synchronized driving context. Naturalistic driving contains long periods of limited body movement, making uniformly sampled evaluation dominated by persistence and less sensitive to brief but behaviorally meaningful motion. To address this, we use dynamics-anchored evaluation, placing forecasting windows around vehicle maneuvers identified offline from CAN signals without providing CAN to the model at inference. Arm motion in pre-maneuver windows is 3.4x greater than in route-matched stable-driving controls. On these anchored windows, learned models reduce forecasting error over persistence by up to 15%, while maneuver-enriched training improves forecast-derived Part-State F1 by 44% over the zero-motion reference. Training on the full multi-source corpus further reduces forecasting error on held-out web drivers by 38% compared with BATON-only training. DriveMotion provides identity-disjoint splits, fixed evaluation subsets, and reference implementations for reproducible evaluation of continuous driver motion forecasting. The dataset and benchmark are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/HenryYHW/DriveMotion
Sep 7, 2026cs.RO

Generation of Vectorized Maps Beyond Vehicle View

Autonomous driving relies on High Definition (HD) maps for safe navigation. Traditional HD maps construction is costly in hardware, data and human resources, which together with its update limitations hinders scalability. Recent works have proposed online alternatives for HD vectorized mapping from onboard sensors. However, sensor field of view is limited, and the range of the reconstructed maps ahead of the vehicle is insufficient for safe planning. This paper aims to address this limitation by proposing the novel beyond-view vectorized map generation problem: given vectorized maps of the area sensed by the vehicle (in-view), to generate plausible map continuations. To experimentally assess its feasibility, we propose BeyondFormer, which, to the best of out knowledge, is the first work designed towards beyond-view map generation. Given the novelty of the problem, we generate the first dataset specifically designed for it and evaluate the proposed approach. The results demonstrate consistent performance across diverse scenarios, establishing learning-based methods as a promising direction for map forecasting in autonomous driving. Beyond demonstrating the feasibility of the task, we provide an extensive discussion of the method's limitations and identify key future research directions for scaling it to more complex driving conditions. Code is available at https://git-autopia.car.upm-csic.es/beyondformer.
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

Understanding Autonomous Driving Datasets by Describing Differences between Image Subsets in Natural Language

Understanding the composition of large-scale autonomous driving datasets is essential for safety, robustness, and reliable operation across domains. For example, domain shift between locations could lead to the operating environment being misaligned with the training data, resulting in potentially dangerous performance degradation. Yet, existing data analysis pipelines largely rely on metadata, predefined labels, or manual inspection, which provide limited semantic insight or do not scale. This paper studies set difference captioning: given two subsets of images, the goal is to produce a natural-language hypothesis describing differences between the target and reference set. Building on a two-stage formulation, we adapt the method to autonomous driving by focusing on object-centric patches derived from object detection, which simplifies aggregation and enables attribution of differences to specific object instances or categories. To evaluate this setting in-domain, we introduce a new benchmark, AD-Diff Bench. Low-concentration experiments assess the suitability of set-difference-captioning approaches to sparse, real-world differences. We restrict our experiments to open-weight models to support reproducibility and ease of deployment. The proposed benchmark and analysis provide a step towards practical, human-interpretable dataset introspection for autonomous driving datasets. Our implementation and benchmark dataset are available at https://github.com/KIT-MRT/AD-Diff
Sep 1, 2026cs.RO

Designing Versatile Samples for Learned Trajectory Scoring

Many current end-to-end driving policies emit a pool of candidate trajectories and select one, which makes selection a separable component: a scorer can be retrained while the planner, its backbone, and its trajectory generator all stay frozen. However, many strong planners concentrate their proposals around safe mode, providing limited supervision near decision boundaries. In this work, we design a training dataset that provides more informative supervision for the scorer. In particular, we construct two generators that perturb the logged human trajectory along the two axes a vehicle can be displaced: laterally toward the drivable boundary and longitudinally toward a leading vehicle. The designed dataset produces more informative positive and negative samples than the base planner's proposal pool. We attach a transformer-based scorer to two frozen generative planners, DiffusionDrive and MeanFuser, and train it on the NAVSIM navtrain dataset. The results of the experiments show that we achieve 90.1 EPDMS on DiffusionDrive and 90.4 EPDMS on MeanFuser when using ResNet-34, with 0.4 and 0.3 EPDMS respectively, from the designed training dataset.
Aug 31, 2026cs.RO

Scene Graph-based Driving Scenario Extraction for Automotive Egocentric Datasets

Extracting scenarios from unlabelled real-world sensor data streams is a critical but challenging task in the development process of automated driving systems (ADS). Automatically sifting through large datasets to spatially and temporally locate critical scenarios can enable scenario-based coverage analysis of ADS datasets. In this paper, we present a method for extracting scenarios from egocentric datasets using scene graphs and Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). We first process egocentric sensor data and HD maps to generate a sequence of scene graphs representing a driving scenario. Next, we use LTL to formally specify driving scenarios of interest, then extract all instances of the scenarios from the dataset using an off-the-shelf model checker, which evaluates the LTL formula against the sequence of scene graphs. Our approach can be used on both simulated and real world datasets. We evaluate the method on the training and validation datasets from Argoverse 2 consisting of 850 15-second real-world driving logs, and several videos of dashcam footage. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for extracting and querying scenarios by evaluating against a rule-based benchmark based on track annotations and HD maps.
Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

Rad-R: A Raw-ADC Radar Dataset and Capture-Invariant SSM for Hardware-Fault Diagnosis

Automotive mmWave radar can develop vibration, antenna misalignment, radome blockage, and receive-channel degradation that corrupt the signal before perception begins. Data for these faults are scarce because each condition must be induced and measured on physical hardware. We introduce Rad-R, a raw-ADC dataset captured with a 4-chip 77GHz TI MMWCAS-RF-EVM cascade (192 virtual channels). Unlike existing raw-radar datasets, Rad-R pairs each recording with a controlled hardware fault at a calibrated severity, an independent physical severity measurement, and frame-synchronised IMU, temperature, GPS, and camera streams. Rad-R is a single-session dataset, so our generalisation claims are confined to a controlled cross-severity protocol in which train and test use physically distinct captures. A reproducible benchmark evaluates seven representative vision backbones and the proposed raw-IQ Mamba SSM (RadrNet) under within-clip, chirp-wise anytime, few-shot cross-capture, and controlled cross-severity protocols. Within-clip performance is near-saturated (>0.98>0.98 macro-F1), whereas cross-severity generalisation remains difficult: the absolute-phase RadrNet-DS falls to 0.490.49 macro-F1. RadrNet-DS-CI replaces absolute phase with per-frame-standardised magnitude and relative chirp-to-chirp phase and ranks first on the controlled benchmark (0.6630.663 vs. 0.6280.628 for the strongest RD-CNN; three seeds); the RadrNet family also leads on the anytime and few-shot budgets. A descriptive cross-modal analysis further finds that radar micro-Doppler covaries with independently measured IMU vibration energy (pooled Spearman ρ=0.41ρ=0.41 across conditions). The complete dataset and code will be released publicly under permissive licences.
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

MV2: Multi-View Multi-Vehicle Driving Dataset for Novel View Synthesis

Differentiable rendering has advanced novel view synthesis (NVS), yet applying it to real-world driving remains difficult due to sparse capture viewpoints, dynamic objects, and limited multi-trajectory data. We introduce the Multi-View Multi-Vehicle (MV2) dataset and benchmark for evaluating NVS models under large viewpoint changes in dynamic urban scenes. MV2 features synchronized captures from a car, scooter, and drone, each following distinct yet synchronized trajectories. Training NVS methods on one vehicle's camera stream and testing on another enables evaluation under substantially larger viewpoint variations than existing single-trajectory datasets. All sequences are registered via Structure-from-Motion and camera poses verified using manual pixel-level correspondence annotations, yielding 50 high-quality scenes with 12000 images. Benchmarking recent NVS and camera pose estimation methods shows that NVS performance degrades with increasing viewpoint disparity, and that feed-forward pose estimators notably lag behind optimization-based approaches, highlighting MV2 as a rigorous testbed for NVS in driving. The dataset, benchmark protocol, and project resources are available at https://mv2-dataset.github.io/.
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Talk2Sensors: 3D Visual Grounding in Autonomous Driving via Sensor-Adaptive Physical Cue Matching

As a key capability for embodied intelligence, 3D visual grounding (3DVG) has been predominantly studied in indoor scenes with RGB-D or point-cloud inputs, while existing outdoor extensions largely rely on monocular images alone. Both settings fall short of real-world outdoor perception, where heterogeneous sensors capture complementary yet distinct physical properties, such as visual texture, 3D geometry, and object kinematics, that are indispensable for flexible and robust query-adaptive grounding but remain under-exploited. To bridge this gap, we introduce Talk2Sensors, the first multi-sensor 3D visual grounding dataset built upon camera, LiDAR, and 4D radar. It contains 8,682 language instructions and 20,558 referred objects, with diverse prompts explicitly aligned with sensor-specific physical cues. Furthermore, we propose TSFormer, a unified Transformer-based framework for language-guided 3D visual grounding in autonomous driving. TSFormer adopts a coarse-to-fine property-aware fusion strategy: the Language-Routed Property Sampler first performs coarse text-conditioned feature retrieval by modulating sensor sampling weights with query-level linguistic cues, while the subsequent Sparse-Preserving Modality Arbiter module conducts fine-grained modality arbitration and text-guided refinement to determine the precise referred spatial location. This design enables dynamic routing of appearance, geometry, and motion cues according to the semantic requirements of each prompt, preventing dense modalities from overwhelming sparse but critical sensor signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks: it improves over the strongest baseline by 8.05 mAP on Talk2Sensors, and transfers to the monocular Mono3DRefer benchmark with 53.05% [email protected].
Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

FactorJEPA: Factorizing Monolithic Futures into Layout-Agent-Interaction Channels for Crowded and Chaotic Global South Urban Worlds

World models have attracted significant attention for their ability to capture and predict the structure and dynamics of the physical world. In this emerging landscape, Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) offer a particularly compelling direction. We study a largely unexplored regime: populous, crowded, and chaotic Global South urban environments, which we call DENSEWORLD. Unlike the lower-density, lane-structured settings that dominate existing evaluations, these scenes exhibit soft spatial boundaries, extreme agent heterogeneity, persistent occlusion, and rapid social negotiation under mixed traffic. We introduce the first large-scale dataset for this regime: 1,000 hours of drive-through, walk-through, and aerial video across 22 cities. Existing JEPA formulations struggle to preserve dense interaction dynamics under heterogeneity and partial observability. We introduce FactorJEPA, which makes world structure a first-class predictive primitive. Rather than encoding the future in a monolithic latent, it composes layout, entities, and interactions, using a visibility gate and separated subspaces to preserve partially observed agents and discourage cross-factor shortcuts. FactorJEPA improves (i) future-latent accuracy (Future-frame L1), (ii) intervention-sensitive prediction (Causal L1), and (iii) robustness to reduced visual evidence (Mask-ratio slope), while exposing (iv) a reproducible motion-information trade-off (Motion cosine). Method rankings replicate across 2B and 1B V-JEPA 2.1 backbones, with rho = 0.895 to 0.978. We publicly release the DENSEWORLD-115k dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymousML123/denseworld-115k) and the surgery-trained FactorJEPA checkpoints (https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymousML123/factorjepa-outputs/tree/main/outputs/full/vjepa_2_1_vitg_1B/train/m09c_surgery_3stage_DI_diheavy_encoder).
Jul 29, 2026cs.RO

Controlled Experiments on Lane Changing by Transitional Autonomous Vehicle: Dataset and Behavioral Insights

This paper presents the North Carolina Transitional Autonomous Vehicle Lane-Changing (NC-tALC) dataset and uses it to characterize mandatory lane-changing behavior of transitional automated vehicles (tAVs). It quantifies the evolution of lead--lag gaps throughout the lane-change process and examines how potential collision risk develops during the maneuver. A controlled field experiment comprising 78 mandatory lane-change trials was conducted on a public roadway in Apex, North Carolina. Four instrumented vehicles created repeatable traffic conditions while varying the lane changer's initial position within the candidate target gap. High-resolution RTK-GNSS/INS trajectories were processed to identify key timestamps, calculate lead, lag, and lane-change gaps, and estimate interactions using time-gap- and speed-based surrogate safety measures. Despite substantial differences in initial conditions, lead and lag gaps consistently converged toward a relatively narrow range near lane crossing. Potential collision risk increased as the maneuver progressed, peaked near physical lane entry, and was dominated by interactions with the target-lane leader. Lane-change completion did not necessarily coincide with the disappearance of collision risk. This study provides one of the first controlled empirical characterizations of the complete mandatory lane-change process of tAVs using repeatable public-road experiments. The NC-tALC dataset supports analysis of behavioral and safety evolution throughout the maneuver rather than only at the gap-acceptance instant. The dataset and findings provide empirical benchmarks for evaluating automated lane-changing behavior, calibrating behavioral models, and validating simulation and safety assessment methods for mandatory lane-change scenarios.
Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Chinese Rural Scenes: An Experimental Study on Real-Synthetic Data Mixing and Model Evaluation

Currently, autonomous driving object detection models face significant data scarcity and generalization challenges when navigating complex Chinese rural traffic scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel real-synthetic mixed object detection dataset tailored specifically for Chinese rural roads and systematically evaluate the performance of 13 mainstream detectors under different real-to-synthetic data ratios, thereby providing empirical evidence for model selection and data strategy design in rural autonomous driving scenarios. Our dataset combines real-world images captured in Weishi County, Henan Province, with parameterized virtual scenes generated via Unreal Engine. To accurately reflect the unique realities of rural traffic, we define a comprehensive 14-category object system encompassing region-specific elements such as electric tricycles, low-speed vehicles (LSVs), and roadside stalls. Under a unified training protocol, we systematically evaluate 13 mainstream detectors -- spanning the YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLO11, and YOLO26 series, as well as RT-DETR-L -- across three data configurations: an all-real baseline, a 1:0.5 real-to-virtual mix, and a 1:1 mix. Experimental results demonstrate that a moderate injection of synthetic data (1:0.5 ratio) effectively enhances detection performance, with YOLO11m achieving the highest [email protected] of 0.758. However, a higher proportion of synthetic data (1:1) introduces domain shifts that offset the benefits of data scaling. While most models reliably identify distinct local vehicles, significant perceptual bottlenecks remain for long-tail, non-standard objects like stalls and railings. This research provides crucial empirical evidence and novel insights for model selection and synthetic data strategies, facilitating the practical deployment of autonomous driving perception systems in rural areas.
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

The LAIA Dataset: Labelled Attention for Intelligent Automobiles

The development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) usually relies heavily on data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) models that require large volumes of sensor data with ground-truth annotations. While modular architectures are widely used, end-to-end driving paradigms offer a promising alternative by directly mapping sensor inputs to control actions. However, their adoption is limited by challenges in interpretability and explainability. To address this, we present LAIA (Labelled Attention for Intelligent Automobiles), a novel synthetic dataset designed to enrich end-to-end driving research with human attention data. Collected using the CARLA simulator in closed-loop environments, LAIA comprises over 15 hours of driving from 44 participants across carefully crafted scenarios designed to evoke natural responses. Each sequence includes RGB images under six weather conditions, semantic and instance segmentation, depth, optical flow, CAN bus signals, and synchronized eye-tracking data. LAIA enables applications including training attention-aware end-to-end AI drivers, predicting driver behavior, developing methods to detect anomalous driver-attention patterns, and improving model explainability. In this work, we use LAIA to compare human attention with the perceptual attention emerging in our end-to-end driving models, thereby providing insight into their behavior.
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

SimBEV2X: A Large-Scale Dataset and Data Generation Tool for Multi-Task Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception

Cooperative perception through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication can overcome the inherent physical limitations of individual autonomous vehicles, such as occlusions and limited sensor range. However, the development of robust V2X algorithms, particularly those relying on unified spatial representations like bird's-eye view (BEV) representation, is hampered by the lack of large-scale, multi-modal, multi-task datasets. Moreover, collecting and annotating a large set of synchronized, real-world multi-agent data is prohibitively expensive. This has resulted in a landscape where existing V2X datasets are notably limited in both size and scope. To overcome this, we introduce SimBEV2X, an advanced synthetic data generation tool built on the CARLA simulator. SimBEV2X automatically creates randomized driving scenarios to collect multi-modal sensor data alongside various types of ground truth including 3D bounding boxes with unique track IDs, HD map information, BEV segmentation maps, and semantic occupancy voxel grids from both vehicles and RSUs. We also present the SimBEV2X dataset, the largest V2X perception dataset to date. The dataset comprises 258 scenes, each involving up to 8 connected vehicles and up to 4 RSUs across a variety of road networks. The SimBEV2X dataset is an order of magnitude larger than existing V2X datasets and contains 102,200 frames, 588,520 lidar point clouds, more than 3 million images, over 27 million bounding boxes, and a comprehensive set of other annotations. Finally, we establish a strong baseline on the SimBEV2X dataset using CoopDet3D and propose CoBEVFusion, a novel architecture that combines CoopDet3D with fused axial attention (FAX) for context-aware multi-agent feature aggregation, resulting in superior performance. SimBEV2X, the SimBEV2X dataset, and CoBEVFusion are available at https://simbev2x.org and https://github.com/GoodarzMehr/SimBEV2X.
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

DriveDNA: A Large-Scale Multimodal Naturalistic Driving Dataset and Benchmark for Driving Style Identification

Driving style captures stable, driver-specific patterns in how a vehicle is driven. In naturalistic data, however, this signal is hard to isolate because drivers are observed in different vehicles, on different roads, and under different conditions, so models may mistake vehicle- or situation-specific regularities for driver-specific style. We introduce DriveDNA, a large-scale naturalistic dataset and benchmark for personalized driving-style modeling, comprising 4,121 drives from 465 drivers across 115 vehicle models and totaling 975 hours of human-controlled driving at 10 Hz with forward video, collected from community drivers in everyday use. DriveDNA defines driving style as a consistent, driver-specific behavioral pattern in how a vehicle moves under similar conditions. The benchmark evaluates this signal through three core tasks: few-shot driver re-identification, personalized behavior prediction, and condition-matched comparison, and provides behavioral annotations plus 276,248 rule-generated maneuver events across six classes with large-scale human auditing. We evaluate baselines spanning classical descriptors, supervised and self-supervised time-series encoders, multimodal fusion, probabilistic prediction, and zero-shot foundation models under a fixed multi-seed protocol. Learned representations substantially outperform classical descriptors on unseen drivers (AUROC .935 vs. .707) and retain driver-specific information under matched driving conditions, while descriptor performance approaches chance. Video-only models achieve comparable re-identification accuracy but exhibit severe route leakage, showing that strong recognition may arise from contextual shortcuts rather than driving behavior. These findings show that reliable driving-style evaluation must assess both the behavioral value of learned representations and their robustness to vehicle, drive, and condition confounds.
Jul 18, 2026cs.RO

SinD 2.0: A Multi-City UAV Dataset with Semantic Risk Annotations for SOTIF-Oriented Safety Validation at Signalized Intersections

Safety validation at signalized intersections remains a critical bottleneck for the deployment of autonomous driving systems (ADS), as these scenarios involve dense heterogeneous traffic, contested right of way, and long-tail safety-critical interactions, posing significant challenges to the Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF). Existing naturalistic driving datasets often suffer from geographical homogeneity, sparsity of safety-critical events, and lack of semantic risk annotations, which limit the evaluation of algorithmic generalizability and targeted SOTIF verification. To address these gaps, this paper introduces SinD 2.0, a large-scale drone-based intersection dataset dedicated to cross-domain ADS safety analysis. The main contributions of SinD 2.0 are: (1) Cross-domain diversity: It covers six signalized intersections across four Chinese cities, capturing distinct intersection topologies and regional driving behavior characteristics; (2) High-density risk interactions: A total of 32,682 safety-critical events are extracted via surrogate safety measures, significantly enriching the density of boundary test scenarios; (3) Hierarchical semantic annotations: Besides integration with high-definition (HD) maps and Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) data, it provides multi-dimensional semantic labels including traffic violations, high-risk interactions, visual shielding, and narrow feasible areas; (4) Full-stack testing toolchain: It supports automated scenario extraction, prediction-only evaluation, open-loop replay, reactive closed-loop testing, and photorealistic rendering. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that SinD 2.0 exhibits significant domain shifts across cities, and the semantic risk subsets can effectively expose the performance limitations of ADS algorithms. The dataset, annotations, and testing toolchain are available at https://github.com/SOTIF-AVLab/SinD/tree/main.
Jul 18, 2026cs.CV

What Do They See? Interpreting Complex Road Scenarios Through the Eyes of Vision-Language-Action Models for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicle Learning

End-to-end autonomous driving models are now able to navigate complex road scenarios, mapping raw sensor observations directly to observed paths for open-loop evaluation and often effective driving in closed-loop evaluation. Yet the internal logic of these safety-critical systems remains largely opaque, due to the complexity of traffic scenes. We propose a counterfactual ablation framework called Counterfactual Vision Action Analysis (CVAA) that systematically removes individual detected objects from front-camera images using photorealistic generative inpainting to prepare counterfactual sets to evaluate the difference in the model's response. This isolates the causal effect of each object's presence on the model's planning behaviour. Applied to the Alpamayo 1 trajectory predictor across 210 nuScenes driving scenes, we create a dataset Counter -nuScenes, using which we see that vehicles and pedestrians within the model's 'path' dominate causal influence as expected, while traffic lights, as expected, exert disproportionate effect relative to their image footprint. However, we also find cases where the model responds strongly to objects a human driver would consider irrelevant. This brings forth a deeper question: does the model itself view the scene as a sum of individual objects influencing the outcome, or does it encode an entirely different set of internal features that do not correspond to human-legible scene elements? To further understand this, we compare intermediate representations of original and inpainted image pairs using mechanistic interpretability techniques and examine the effect of the removal through the various model layers. Together, these two stages offer a path from behavioral auditing to representational understanding, creating explainable driving systems and solidifying human-AI trust.
Jul 18, 2026cs.CV

FogDrive: A Multi-Modal Synthetic Driving Dataset for Perception under Graded Fog

Perception under adverse weather remains a critical bottleneck for reliable autonomous driving, yet existing benchmarks lack the systematic multi-modal alignments needed to evaluate robust sensor fusion. Real-world weather datasets suffer from uncontrolled collection and single-level, uncalibrated conditions, while synthetic alternatives either target camera-only restoration or lack the paired clean-and-foggy structure needed to benchmark "defog-then-detect" pipelines. We present FogDrive, a rigorously calibrated, multi-modal autonomous-driving dataset bridging data-centric engineering and robust machine learning. Built with the CARLA simulator, FogDrive contains 660 scenes (~133k fully annotated frames, 50:50 day/night) across four synchronized cameras (RGB, depth, semantic segmentation), a LiDAR and semantic-LiDAR pair, and front radar. Physically consistent fog is modeled independently on camera channels (Koschmieder model) and LiDAR channels (Beer-Lambert law) at three calibrated visibility densities (160m, 100m, 50m). Every scene ships in four matched variants (clean plus three graded fog levels) with cross-calibrated 2D and 3D bounding boxes. A semantic-segmentation-based quality audit over 8k images validates annotations at 95.1% precision and over 99% recall for vehicles within 40m. We establish baseline benchmarks with state-of-the-art architectures (TransFusion, BEVFusion, YOLOv8-m) across two paradigms: 3D multi-modal fusion and 2D image restoration. These yield critical data-centric insights: mixing multi-density fog during training tightens 3D bounding-box geometry without added data-scaling cost, while in 2D pipelines image-quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM) prove poor predictors of downstream detection performance. FogDrive will be fully open-sourced alongside our data-generation framework to accelerate robust, multi-modal research.
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

3D Lane Detection with Odometry for High-Speed Vehicle Racing

Lane boundary detection is a critical component in autonomous driving systems and has been rigorously studied in regular driving scenarios. However, it is less explored in vehicle racing, where the car moves at higher speeds across more extreme road geometries. To study this problem, we introduce a new dataset for 3D lane detection in racing, featuring >250250k images from multiple camera feeds and inertial measurements taken with a Lexus LC 500 driving on a closed circuit. With this dataset, we compare various approaches to 3D lane detection and propose modifications that permit frames to be processed at rates of almost 300Hz while retaining high predictive performance in the racing application. This facilitates a multi-camera ensemble approach that is validated on hardware. We show that sensing modalities such as inertial measurements can be leveraged for pre-integration to regress road geometries over both cameras and time, yielding improvements in key metrics. Compared to methods such as BevLaneDet, adding odometry and ensemble predictions improves the F1 score by 3 points and reduces near-vehicle mean absolute errors (MAEs) by >30%>30 \%. We show F1 scores >>0.9 and lateral MAEs of <<0.18m in vehicle deployments.
Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

nuTruck: Benchmarking Autonomous Driving Planning for Distributed Electric-drive Trucks

The dominance of traditional rule-based methods in autonomous driving has gradually been replaced by learning-based approaches. While learning-based planners have achieved considerable success in passenger vehicles, their performance on heavy-duty trucks, particularly modern distributed electric-drive trucks (DETs), remains largely unexplored. To facilitate research and application of learning-based planners in DETs, this letter presents the first high-fidelity benchmark, called nuTruck, designed to support large-scale neural network training and closed-loop evaluation. Given the complex dynamics and high rollover susceptibility of DETs, we first incorporate a highly accurate nonlinear truck dynamical model into the simulation, which enables independent driving and steering of all wheels and captures dynamic load transfer caused by acceleration, deceleration, and cornering, thereby allowing quantitative assessment of rollover risk in closed-loop simulation. Second, we adapt several rule-based and learning-based planners as baselines for DETs and evaluate their performance in closed-loop simulation. Finally, using real-world driving scenarios from the nuPlan dataset, we conduct extensive closed-loop evaluations, analyzing not only conventional collision-free planning performance, but also the dynamical safety of the planned trajectories. The proposed nuTruck benchmark is expected to serve as a new standard for fair and realistic evaluation of autonomous driving planners on DETs.
Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

Event-RGB Adaptive Tracking for Nighttime Highway Perception

Intelligent Transportation Systems deployed on highways predominantly rely on conventional RGB cameras for traffic perception and vehicle tracking. However, highway environments present unique challenges: the absence of artificial lighting infrastructure, combined with high vehicle velocities, results in severely degraded perception performance under low-light conditions. Specifically, nighttime scenarios suffer from motion blur, insufficient exposure, and poor signal-to-noise ratios, which catastrophically impair the reliability of RGB-based sensing systems. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Joint Event-RGB Adaptive Tracking (JEAT) framework. Unlike existing multi-sensor trackers constrained by rigid, hard-coded prioritization, JEAT merges asynchronous event streams and RGB frames into a unified joint data association optimization. By employing an Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter to continuously estimate measurement noise via NIS statistics, the framework dynamically weights and fuses both modalities, optimally harnessing event streams during dark or high-speed motion while leveraging RGB frames under bright or static conditions. Furthermore, given the absence of publicly available datasets tailored for event-based highway perception with diverse environmental conditions, we present SEHN, a large-scale synthetic dataset generated using the CARLA simulator. Our dataset encompasses diverse environmental conditions (daytime, nighttime, nighttime with out artificial lighting) and varying traffic densities, providing synchronized RGB imagery and event streams to facilitate multi-modal fusion research. Our code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/haidongwang96/SEHN.
Jul 10, 2026cs.CV

Multimodal Scenario Similarity Search for Autonomous Driving

Large-scale autonomous-driving datasets contain vast numbers of recorded scenarios, creating a need for efficient retrieval methods that can identify situations similar to a given query. Existing approaches typically rely on either visual representations or motion-based descriptions, making it difficult to understand their relative strengths and limitations for scenario retrieval. In this work, we present a multimodal framework for autonomous-driving scenario retrieval that combines visual and trajectory-based representations within a unified retrieval pipeline. We investigate two trajectory-based approaches: Exo-Trajectory, an explicit matching method based on surrounding-agent motion, and ScenarioFormer, a transformer-based representation learned from object trajectories using contrastive learning. We compare these approaches against strong vision-based baselines and analyze their behavior across a diverse set of driving scenarios. Experimental results show that trajectory representations provide strong retrieval performance for motion-centric events such as cut-ins, turning maneuvers, and traffic queueing, while visual embeddings excel when appearance cues are informative. Most importantly, combining visual and trajectory information consistently improves retrieval quality, yielding the best overall performance. These findings demonstrate that appearance and motion capture are complementary notions of scenario similarity and motivate multimodal retrieval systems for autonomous-driving data mining, dataset curation, and scenario-based validation.
Jul 10, 2026cs.RO

BeyondSight: Object Permanence for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving operates in partially observable environments where actors may become fully occluded by other vehicles or infrastructure. Most end-to-end driving systems implicitly couple actor existence to instantaneous observations, causing actor hypotheses to degrade or disappear during prolonged occlusion and removing potentially critical agents from downstream prediction and planning. We introduce BeyondSight, a permanence-aware end-to-end driving framework that decouples actor existence from observability by maintaining persistent actor hypotheses over time. BeyondSight propagates actor queries temporally and updates them with observation-conditioned evidence, enabling joint perception, prediction, and planning to reason about actors even when they are temporarily unobservable. To enable principled training and evaluation of persistence-aware models, we further introduce nuScenes-Permanence, an extension of nuScenes that provides supervision and observability-conditioned evaluation for unobservable actors. Experiments show that BeyondSight substantially improves reasoning under occlusion, increasing detection performance for unobservable actors from 0 to 0.249 mAP while reducing planning error from 0.61 to 0.54 L2avg. These results highlight object permanence as an important modeling principle for robust end-to-end autonomous driving.