# WildRoadBench: A Wild Aerial Road-Damage Grounding Benchmark for Vision-Language Models and Autonomous Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20306/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 15 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce WildRoadBench, a wild aerial road-damage grounding benchmark that couples direct visual grounding by vision-language models with autonomous research-and-engineering by LLM-driven agents on a single professionally annotated UAV corpus. The same image set and the same per-class AP_50 metric are evaluated under two protocols. The VLM Track measures whether a fixed VLM can localise domain-specific damage from one image and one short prompt under a unified prompting, decoding and parsing pipeline. The Agent Track measures whether an autonomous agent, given only a written task brief, a small exploratory slice and a fixed interaction budget, can search the public web, adapt pretrained components, write training and inference code, and submit predictions through a scalar-feedback oracle on a hidden holdout. We benchmark a broad pool of closed-source frontier models and open-source VLMs together with several frontier LLM-driven agents. Both routes remain far from reliable performance in this wild setting: closed-source frontier models lead the VLM leaderboard but still leave more than half of the metric on the table; open-source grounders plateau well below them, and newer generations or reasoning-style variants do not consistently improve grounding; small targets collapse for every open-source model; agents lag the strongest VLM despite richer affordances, and several fail to land a valid submission within the budget. We release the code and data at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/wildroadbench-0607 to support reproducible follow-up research.