STSBench: A Spatio-temporal Scenario Benchmark for Multi-modal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving

We introduce STSBench, a scenario-based framework to benchmark the holistic understanding of vision-language models (VLMs) for autonomous driving. The framework automatically mines predefined traffic scenarios from any dataset using ground-truth annotations, provides an intuitive user interface for efficient human verification, and generates multiple-choice questions for model evaluation. Applied to the nuScenes dataset, we present STSnu, the first benchmark that evaluates the spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities of VLMs based on comprehensive 3D perception. Existing benchmarks typically target off-the-shelf or fine-tuned VLMs for images or videos from a single viewpoint, focusing on semantic tasks such as object recognition, dense captioning, risk assessment, or scene understanding. In contrast, STSnu evaluates driving expert VLMs for end-to-end driving, operating on videos from multi-view cameras or LiDAR. It specifically assesses their ability to reason about both ego-vehicle actions and complex interactions among traffic participants, a crucial capability for autonomous vehicles.