# NuScenes-QA: A Multi-modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenario

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14836 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14836/

## Key facts

- Cited by 262 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [TGIF-QA: Toward Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04497/) (2017)
- [ScanQA: 3D Question Answering for Spatial Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10482/) (2021)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11543/) (2017)
- [SQA3D: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07474/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of GPT-3 for Few-Shot Knowledge-Based VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05014/) (2021)
- [Bilinear Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07932/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Talk2Car: Taking Control of Your Self-Driving Car](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10838/) (2019)
- [Referring Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03366/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 262)

- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13757/) (2025)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08052/) (2025)
- [OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23463/) (2025)
- [Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22313/) (2024)
- [SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09594/) (2025)
- [Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00088/) (2025)
- [LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14115/) (2023)
- [OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04348/) (2025)
- [LLM4Drive: A Survey of Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01043/) (2023)
- [Vision Language Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14414/) (2023)
- [Reason2Drive: Towards Interpretable and Chain-based Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03661/) (2023)
- [Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04003/) (2025)
- [Language Prompt for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04379/) (2023)
- [AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07608/) (2025)
- [LiDAR-LLM: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for 3D LiDAR Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14074/) (2023)
- [Talk2BEV: Language-enhanced Bird's-eye View Maps for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02251/) (2023)
- [VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14446/) (2024)
- [OccLLaMA: An Occupancy-Language-Action Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03272/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Benchmarks of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08632/) (2024)
- [Automated Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models on Self-driving Corner Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10595/) (2024)
- [Holistic Autonomous Driving Understanding by Bird's-Eye-View Injected Multi-Modal Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00988/) (2024)
- [DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16996/) (2024)
- [MMIU: Multimodal Multi-image Understanding for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02718/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01454/) (2024)
- [Embodied Understanding of Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04593/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a novel visual question answering (VQA) task in the context of autonomous driving, aiming to answer natural language questions based on street-view clues. Compared to traditional VQA tasks, VQA in autonomous driving scenario presents more challenges. Firstly, the raw visual data are multi-modal, including images and point clouds captured by camera and LiDAR, respectively. Secondly, the data are multi-frame due to the continuous, real-time acquisition. Thirdly, the outdoor scenes exhibit both moving foreground and static background. Existing VQA benchmarks fail to adequately address these complexities. To bridge this gap, we propose NuScenes-QA, the first benchmark for VQA in the autonomous driving scenario, encompassing 34K visual scenes and 460K question-answer pairs. Specifically, we leverage existing 3D detection annotations to generate scene graphs and design question templates manually. Subsequently, the question-answer pairs are generated programmatically based on these templates. Comprehensive statistics prove that our NuScenes-QA is a balanced large-scale benchmark with diverse question formats. Built upon it, we develop a series of baselines that employ advanced 3D detection and VQA techniques. Our extensive experiments highlight the challenges posed by this new task. Codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/qiantianwen/NuScenes-QA.