NuRisk: A Visual Question Answering Dataset for Agent-Level Risk Assessment in Autonomous Driving

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Main Authors: Gao, Yuan, Piccinini, Mattia, Brusnicki, Roberto, Zhang, Yuchen, Betz, Johannes
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Gao, Yuan
Piccinini, Mattia
Brusnicki, Roberto
Zhang, Yuchen
Betz, Johannes
author_facet Gao, Yuan
Piccinini, Mattia
Brusnicki, Roberto
Zhang, Yuchen
Betz, Johannes
contents Understanding risk in autonomous driving requires not only perception and prediction, but also high-level reasoning about agent behavior and context. Current Vision Language Model (VLM)-based methods primarily ground agents in static images and provide qualitative judgments, lacking the spatio-temporal reasoning needed to capture how risks evolve over time. To address this gap, we propose NuRisk, a comprehensive Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset comprising 2.9K scenarios and 1.1M agent-level samples, built on real-world data from nuScenes and Waymo, completed with safety-critical scenarios from the CommonRoad simulator. The dataset provides Bird's-eye view (BEV) based sequential images with quantitative, agent-level risk annotations, enabling spatio-temporal reasoning. We benchmark well-known VLMs across different prompting techniques and find that they fail to perform explicit spatio-temporal reasoning, resulting in a peak accuracy of 33% at high latency. To address these shortcomings, our fine-tuned 7B VLM agent improves accuracy to 41% and reduces latency by 75%, demonstrating explicit spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities that proprietary models lacked. While this represents a significant step forward, the modest accuracy underscores the profound challenge of the task, establishing NuRisk as a critical benchmark for advancing spatio-temporal reasoning in autonomous driving. More information can be found at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/NuRisk.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25944
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NuRisk: A Visual Question Answering Dataset for Agent-Level Risk Assessment in Autonomous Driving
Gao, Yuan
Piccinini, Mattia
Brusnicki, Roberto
Zhang, Yuchen
Betz, Johannes
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding risk in autonomous driving requires not only perception and prediction, but also high-level reasoning about agent behavior and context. Current Vision Language Model (VLM)-based methods primarily ground agents in static images and provide qualitative judgments, lacking the spatio-temporal reasoning needed to capture how risks evolve over time. To address this gap, we propose NuRisk, a comprehensive Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset comprising 2.9K scenarios and 1.1M agent-level samples, built on real-world data from nuScenes and Waymo, completed with safety-critical scenarios from the CommonRoad simulator. The dataset provides Bird's-eye view (BEV) based sequential images with quantitative, agent-level risk annotations, enabling spatio-temporal reasoning. We benchmark well-known VLMs across different prompting techniques and find that they fail to perform explicit spatio-temporal reasoning, resulting in a peak accuracy of 33% at high latency. To address these shortcomings, our fine-tuned 7B VLM agent improves accuracy to 41% and reduces latency by 75%, demonstrating explicit spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities that proprietary models lacked. While this represents a significant step forward, the modest accuracy underscores the profound challenge of the task, establishing NuRisk as a critical benchmark for advancing spatio-temporal reasoning in autonomous driving. More information can be found at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/NuRisk.
title NuRisk: A Visual Question Answering Dataset for Agent-Level Risk Assessment in Autonomous Driving
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25944