mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Do LiDAR Language Models Really Understand Spatio-temporal Relationships?

arXiv 2609.24452 ↗First posted 21 Sep 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.ROcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Recent 4D LiDAR language models aim to reason about objects and their evolving spatial relationships. Yet, in our evaluation, always selecting the same option nearly matches the multiple-choice accuracy of two B4DL-derived configurations. We introduce LiDAR-Hallu, a geometry-referenced benchmark and diagnostic protocol with 10,000 questions across 150 nuScenes scenes. It covers object existence, ego-relative position, distance ordering, relative motion, and temporal localization, with explicit rules for selecting objects, comparing times, and determining reference answers. Our protocol combines fixed-answer and candidate-content controls, cross-scene pairs with identical prompts but opposite reference answers, and relation-specific recall. Analysis of 100,000 recorded responses reveals failures hidden by aggregate accuracy. Candidate duration alone makes temporal answers predictable without observing LiDAR. On paired questions, the models frequently give the same answer to scenes requiring opposite answers. Relation-specific analysis further shows that both configurations miss every positive lateral-motion case across all tested conditions. Temporal-shuffle contrastive decoding provides little net improvement, as repairs are largely offset by new errors and the main failures persist. These results show that evaluating spatio-temporal reasoning requires testing whether models distinguish the queried physical relationships, rather than relying on individual-answer accuracy alone. The source code, checkpoints, and data are released at https://github.com/Awesome4D/4DMLLM_Hallucination_Bench.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2026.

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26 of 29 references.

References · 26

  1. 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,523
  2. 2016Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answeringcited by 2,516
  3. 2023Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 1,729
  4. 2023Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decodingcited by 688
  5. 2018Object Hallucination in Image Captioningcited by 669
  6. 2022When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?cited by 610
  7. 2023DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answeringcited by 536
  8. 2022Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionalitycited by 529
  9. 2023DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Modelcited by 461
  10. 2017Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answeringcited by 339
  11. 2023AMBER: An LLM-free Multi-dimensional Benchmark for MLLMs Hallucination Evaluationcited by 300
  12. 2023Large Language Models Sensitivity to The Order of Options in Multiple-Choice Questionscited by 263
14 more
  1. 2023NuScenes-QA: A Multi-modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenariocited by 262
  2. 2023LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Drivingcited by 145
  3. 2023LiDAR-LLM: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for 3D LiDAR Understandingcited by 95
  4. 2024VidHalluc: Evaluating Temporal Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models for Video Understandingcited by 68
  5. 2024EventHallusion: Diagnosing Event Hallucinations in Video LLMscited by 57
  6. 2025NuScenes-SpatialQA: A Spatial Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Drivingcited by 35
  7. 2022LidarCLIP or: How I Learned to Talk to Point Cloudscited by 33
  8. 2025Unveiling the Mist over 3D Vision-Language Understanding: Object-centric Evaluation with Chain-of-Analysiscited by 23
  9. 2024Strengthened Symbol Binding Makes Large Language Models Reliable Multiple-Choice Selectorscited by 15
  10. 2026Do 3D Large Language Models Really Understand 3D Spatial Relationships?cited by 9
  11. 20254D-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for 4D Object Understandingcited by 8
  12. 2025Spatial4D-Bench: A Versatile 4D Spatial Intelligence Benchmarkcited by 3
  13. 2025B4DL: A Benchmark for 4D LiDAR LLM in Spatio-Temporal Understandingcited by 2
  14. 2026DRIVESPATIAL: A Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Intelligence in VLMs for Autonomous Drivingcited by 2

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  2. 2026Into the LidarVerse: A Real-Time Unified LiDAR World Model Across Tasks and Sensors
  3. 2025LiDPM: Rethinking Point Diffusion for Lidar Scene Completion
  4. 2025LiDARCrafter: Dynamic 4D World Modeling from LiDAR Sequences
  5. 2025Learning to Generate 4D LiDAR Sequences
  6. 2026Iterate or Widen? When Test-Time Refinement Helps LiDAR Scene Completion: A Controlled Study of Evidence Geometry, Training Coverage, and Compute
  7. 2026DENALI: A Dataset Enabling Non-Line-of-Sight Spatial Reasoning with Low-Cost LiDARs
  8. 2025VLM4D: Towards Spatiotemporal Awareness in Vision Language Models