Phu Loc Nguyen

Hao Vo, Khoa Vo, Phu Loc Nguyen et al.

Spatiotemporal intelligence in autonomous driving (AD) requires an agent to integrate multi-view observations into a coherent scene representation, maintain object continuity across viewpoints and time, and reason about spatial relations, interactions, and future dynamics. However, existing AD vision-language benchmarks largely focus on single-view, static, ego-centric, or single-source question answering, leaving it unclear whether current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can truly construct and reason over dynamic driving scenes. We introduce DriveSpatial, a benchmark of 15.6K human-verified QA pairs across 20 tasks from five large-scale AD datasets. DriveSpatial evaluates four abilities: Cognitive Scene Construction, Multi-view Relational Understanding, Temporal Reasoning, and Generalization. Unlike prior benchmarks, DriveSpatial is generated from a dynamic multi-relational scene graph that encodes object states, spatial relations, interactions, camera visibility, and temporal correspondences, enabling QA pairs that enforce genuine cross-view and spatiotemporal reasoning. Evaluating 15 representative VLMs reveals a substantial human-model gap: the strongest model trails humans by 28.4 points, with Cognitive Scene Construction emerging as the key bottleneck. Further diagnostics show that language-only prompting is insufficient, while explicit BEV grounding consistently improves performance. These results suggest that current VLMs lack the scene-construction ability needed for reliable spatiotemporal driving intelligence. DriveSpatial and its construction pipeline will be released to support future research.

Hao Vo, Phu Loc Nguyen, Khoa Vo et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on 2D visual tasks, yet enhancing their spatial intelligence for real-world applications such as Autonomous Vehicles (AV) remains an open challenge. Existing geometry-aware MLLMs typically rely on auxiliary 3D models at inference time, introducing pipeline complexity and the risk of cascading failures. In this paper, we present OmniSpace, a simple yet effective plug-and-play paradigm for geometry-aware spatial reasoning from purely 2D observations. Motivated by our finding that current MLLMs are bottlenecked by weak cross-view correspondence and depth estimation, OmniSpace introduces a Camera Pose Injector, a Multi-view Epipolar Attention module, and a 3D Geometric Distillation objective that jointly address these two limitations by transferring geometric knowledge into the model. Extensive experiments show that OmniSpace surpasses existing methods on planning benchmarks (nuScenes, Bench2Drive), risk detection (nuInstruct), language (Omnidrive), and generalization (DriveBench).