Fine-Grained Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving
This work addresses the need for better assessment tools for VLMs in autonomous driving, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarks by adding granularity.
The paper tackles the problem of insufficient evaluation benchmarks for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in autonomous driving by introducing VLADBench, a fine-grained dataset with close-form QAs across 5 domains, revealing critical limitations in existing models and demonstrating its utility through training on 1.4M domain-specific QAs.
Existing benchmarks for Vision-Language Model (VLM) on autonomous driving (AD) primarily assess interpretability through open-form visual question answering (QA) within coarse-grained tasks, which remain insufficient to assess capabilities in complex driving scenarios. To this end, we introduce $\textbf{VLADBench}$, a challenging and fine-grained dataset featuring close-form QAs that progress from static foundational knowledge and elements to advanced reasoning for dynamic on-road situations. The elaborate $\textbf{VLADBench}$ spans 5 key domains: Traffic Knowledge Understanding, General Element Recognition, Traffic Graph Generation, Target Attribute Comprehension, and Ego Decision-Making and Planning. These domains are further broken down into 11 secondary aspects and 29 tertiary tasks for a granular evaluation. A thorough assessment of general and domain-specific (DS) VLMs on this benchmark reveals both their strengths and critical limitations in AD contexts. To further exploit the cognitive and reasoning interactions among the 5 domains for AD understanding, we start from a small-scale VLM and train the DS models on individual domain datasets (collected from 1.4M DS QAs across public sources). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed benchmark provides a crucial step toward a more comprehensive assessment of VLMs in AD, paving the way for the development of more cognitively sophisticated and reasoning-capable AD systems.