NuScenes-SpatialQA: A Spatial Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving

Kexin Tian, Jingrui Mao, Yunlong Zhang, Jiwan Jiang, Yang Zhou, Zhengzhong Tu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2025, pp. 4567-4576

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for autonomous driving tasks. However, their spatial understanding and reasoning--key capabilities for autonomous driving--still exhibit significant limitations. Notably, none of the existing benchmarks systematically evaluate VLMs' spatial reasoning capabilities in driving scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose NuScenes-SpatialQA, the first large-scale ground-truth-based Question-Answer (QA) benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities of VLMs in autonomous driving. Built upon the NuScenes dataset, the benchmark is constructed through an automated 3D scene graph generation pipeline and a QA generation pipeline. The benchmark systematically evaluates VLMs' performance in both spatial understanding and reasoning across multiple dimensions. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse VLMs, including general, spatial-enhanced, and lightweight VLMs, providing the first comprehensive evaluation of their spatial capabilities in autonomous driving. Surprisingly, the experimental results show that the spatial-enhanced VLM outperforms in qualitative QA but does not demonstrate competitiveness in quantitative QA. In general, VLMs still face considerable challenges in spatial understanding and reasoning.