From Leaderboard to Deployment: Code Quality Challenges in AV Perception Repositories

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Karvat, Mateus, Adams, Bram, Givigi, Sidney
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866912937662218240
author Karvat, Mateus
Adams, Bram
Givigi, Sidney
author_facet Karvat, Mateus
Adams, Bram
Givigi, Sidney
contents Autonomous vehicle (AV) perception models are typically evaluated solely on benchmark performance metrics, with limited attention to code quality, production readiness and long-term maintainability. This creates a significant gap between research excellence and real-world deployment in safety-critical systems subject to international safety standards. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale empirical study of software quality in AV perception repositories, systematically analyzing 178 unique models from the KITTI and NuScenes 3D Object Detection leaderboards. Using static analysis tools (Pylint, Bandit, and Radon), we evaluated code errors, security vulnerabilities, maintainability, and development practices. Our findings revealed that only 7.3% of the studied repositories meet basic production-readiness criteria, defined as having zero critical errors and no high-severity security vulnerabilities. Security issues are highly concentrated, with the top five issues responsible for almost 80% of occurrences, which prompted us to develop a set of actionable guidelines to prevent them. Additionally, the adoption of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines was correlated with better code maintainability. Our findings highlight that leaderboard performance does not reflect production readiness and that targeted interventions could substantially improve the quality and safety of AV perception code.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02194
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Leaderboard to Deployment: Code Quality Challenges in AV Perception Repositories
Karvat, Mateus
Adams, Bram
Givigi, Sidney
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Robotics
Software Engineering
Autonomous vehicle (AV) perception models are typically evaluated solely on benchmark performance metrics, with limited attention to code quality, production readiness and long-term maintainability. This creates a significant gap between research excellence and real-world deployment in safety-critical systems subject to international safety standards. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale empirical study of software quality in AV perception repositories, systematically analyzing 178 unique models from the KITTI and NuScenes 3D Object Detection leaderboards. Using static analysis tools (Pylint, Bandit, and Radon), we evaluated code errors, security vulnerabilities, maintainability, and development practices. Our findings revealed that only 7.3% of the studied repositories meet basic production-readiness criteria, defined as having zero critical errors and no high-severity security vulnerabilities. Security issues are highly concentrated, with the top five issues responsible for almost 80% of occurrences, which prompted us to develop a set of actionable guidelines to prevent them. Additionally, the adoption of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines was correlated with better code maintainability. Our findings highlight that leaderboard performance does not reflect production readiness and that targeted interventions could substantially improve the quality and safety of AV perception code.
title From Leaderboard to Deployment: Code Quality Challenges in AV Perception Repositories
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Robotics
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02194