# Mapillary Vistas Validation for Fine-Grained Traffic Signs: A Benchmark Revealing Vision-Language Model Limitations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02047/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 8 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [The Mapillary Traffic Sign Dataset for Detection and Classification on a Global Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04422/) (2019)
- [CURE-TSR: Challenging Unreal and Real Environments for Traffic Sign Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02463/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Vision as Unified Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06560/) (2026)
- [Jailbreaking Large Vision Language Models in Intelligent Transportation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13892/) (2025)
- [EG-ARSA: An Expert-Grounded Open Model for Visual Road Safety Auditing in Low-Resource Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23563/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Obtaining high-quality fine-grained annotations for traffic signs is critical for accurate and safe decision-making in autonomous driving. Widely used datasets, such as Mapillary, often provide only coarse-grained labels - without distinguishing semantically important types such as stop signs or speed limit signs. To this end, we present a new validation set for traffic signs derived from the Mapillary dataset called Mapillary Vistas Validation for Traffic Signs (MVV), where we decompose composite traffic signs into granular, semantically meaningful categories. The dataset includes pixel-level instance masks and has been manually annotated by expert annotators to ensure label fidelity. Further, we benchmark several state-of-the-art VLMs against the self-supervised DINOv2 model on this dataset and show that DINOv2 consistently outperforms all VLM baselines-not only on traffic sign recognition, but also on heavily represented categories like vehicles and humans. Our analysis reveals significant limitations in current vision-language models for fine-grained visual understanding and establishes DINOv2 as a strong baseline for dense semantic matching in autonomous driving scenarios. This dataset and evaluation framework pave the way for more reliable, interpretable, and scalable perception systems. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/nec-labs-ma/relabeling