# DSBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating External and In-Cabin Risks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14592/

## 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 39 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 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, 30 of 39)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02410/) (2017)
- [Kimi-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07491/) (2025)
- [Seed1.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07062/) (2025)
- [MME-RealWorld: Could Your Multimodal LLM Challenge High-Resolution Real-World Scenarios that are Difficult for Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13257/) (2024)
- [NuScenes-QA: A Multi-modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14836/) (2023)
- [Textual Explanations for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11546/) (2018)
- [One Million Scenes for Autonomous Driving: ONCE Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11037/) (2021)
- [LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14115/) (2023)
- [A Survey of End-to-End Driving: Architectures and Training Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06404/) (2020)
- [MiMo: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of Language Model -- From Pretraining to Posttraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07608/) (2025)
- [Hunyuan-Large: An Open-Source MoE Model with 52 Billion Activated Parameters by Tencent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02265/) (2024)
- [Automated Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models on Self-driving Corner Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10595/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer2.5-Reward: A Simple Yet Effective Multi-Modal Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12368/) (2025)
- [Making Large Language Models Better Planners with Reasoning-Decision Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13890/) (2024)
- [AIDE: A Vision-Driven Multi-View, Multi-Modal, Multi-Tasking Dataset for Assistive Driving Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13933/) (2023)
- [Joint Attention in Autonomous Driving (JAAD)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04741/) (2016)
- [DriveLMM-o1: A Step-by-Step Reasoning Dataset and Large Multimodal Model for Driving Scenario Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10621/) (2025)
- [RoboTron-Drive: All-in-One Large Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07689/) (2024)
- [X-SAM: From Segment Anything to Any Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04655/) (2025)

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

- [DriveVLM-RL: Neuroscience-Inspired Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language Models for Safe and Deployable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18315/) (2026)
- [Planning Takes More Than Token Prediction: Causal Plan for Benchmarking and Building Physically Grounded Embodied Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01810/) (2026)
- [GeoDrive-Bench: Benchmarking Region-Specific Multimodal Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02774/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show great promise for autonomous driving, but their suitability for safety-critical scenarios is largely unexplored, raising safety concerns. This issue arises from the lack of comprehensive benchmarks that assess both external environmental risks and in-cabin driving behavior safety simultaneously. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce DSBench, the first comprehensive Driving Safety Benchmark designed to assess a VLM's awareness of various safety risks in a unified manner. DSBench encompasses two major categories: external environmental risks and in-cabin driving behavior safety, divided into 10 key categories and a total of 28 sub-categories. This comprehensive evaluation covers a wide range of scenarios, ensuring a thorough assessment of VLMs' performance in safety-critical contexts. Extensive evaluations across various mainstream open-source and closed-source VLMs reveal significant performance degradation under complex safety-critical situations, highlighting urgent safety concerns. To address this, we constructed a large dataset of 98K instances focused on in-cabin and external safety scenarios, showing that fine-tuning on this dataset significantly enhances the safety performance of existing VLMs and paves the way for advancing autonomous driving technology. The benchmark toolkit, code, and model checkpoints will be publicly accessible.