AutoDrive-QA: A Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Vision-Language Evaluation in Urban Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Khalili, Boshra, Smyth, Andrew W.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908576308527104
author Khalili, Boshra
Smyth, Andrew W.
author_facet Khalili, Boshra
Smyth, Andrew W.
contents Evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in urban driving contexts remains challenging, as existing benchmarks rely on open-ended responses that are ambiguous, annotation-intensive, and inconsistent to score. This lack of standardized evaluation slows progress toward safe and reliable AI for urban mobility. We introduce AutoDrive-QA, the first benchmark that systematically converts open-ended driving QA datasets (DriveLM, NuScenes-QA, LingoQA) into structured multiple-choice questions (MCQs) with distractors grounded in five realistic error categories: Driving Domain Misconceptions, Logical Inconsistencies, Misinterpreted Sensor Inputs, Computational Oversights, and Question Ambiguity. This framework enables reproducible and interpretable evaluation of VLMs across perception, prediction, and planning tasks in complex urban scenes. Experiments show that fine-tuning LLaVA-1.5-7B improves accuracy by about six percentage points across tasks, GPT-4V achieves the strongest zero-shot performance with up to 69.8% accuracy, and Qwen2-VL models also perform competitively, particularly in multi-view settings. Moreover, traditional metrics such as BLEU and CIDEr fail to distinguish strong from weak models. By providing an objective, domain-grounded evaluation protocol, AutoDrive-QA contributes to more transparent benchmarking of urban AI systems, supporting the development of safer and more trustworthy autonomous driving technologies for smart cities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_15778
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AutoDrive-QA: A Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Vision-Language Evaluation in Urban Autonomous Driving
Khalili, Boshra
Smyth, Andrew W.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in urban driving contexts remains challenging, as existing benchmarks rely on open-ended responses that are ambiguous, annotation-intensive, and inconsistent to score. This lack of standardized evaluation slows progress toward safe and reliable AI for urban mobility. We introduce AutoDrive-QA, the first benchmark that systematically converts open-ended driving QA datasets (DriveLM, NuScenes-QA, LingoQA) into structured multiple-choice questions (MCQs) with distractors grounded in five realistic error categories: Driving Domain Misconceptions, Logical Inconsistencies, Misinterpreted Sensor Inputs, Computational Oversights, and Question Ambiguity. This framework enables reproducible and interpretable evaluation of VLMs across perception, prediction, and planning tasks in complex urban scenes. Experiments show that fine-tuning LLaVA-1.5-7B improves accuracy by about six percentage points across tasks, GPT-4V achieves the strongest zero-shot performance with up to 69.8% accuracy, and Qwen2-VL models also perform competitively, particularly in multi-view settings. Moreover, traditional metrics such as BLEU and CIDEr fail to distinguish strong from weak models. By providing an objective, domain-grounded evaluation protocol, AutoDrive-QA contributes to more transparent benchmarking of urban AI systems, supporting the development of safer and more trustworthy autonomous driving technologies for smart cities.
title AutoDrive-QA: A Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Vision-Language Evaluation in Urban Autonomous Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15778