Autonomous Vehicles (AV) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been revolutionized by Deep Learning. As a data-driven approach, Deep Learning relies on vast amounts of driving data, typically labeled in great detail. As a result, datasets, alongside hardware and algorithms, are foundational building blocks for the development of AVs. In this work we revisit one of the most widely used autonomous driving datasets: the nuScenes dataset. nuScenes exemplifies key trends in AV development, being the first dataset to include radar data, to feature diverse urban driving scenes from two continents, and to be collected using a fully autonomous vehicle operating on public roads, while also promoting multi-modal sensor fusion, standardized benchmarks, and a broad range of tasks including perception, localization \& mapping, prediction and planning. We provide an unprecedented look into the creation of nuScenes, as well as its extensions nuImages and Panoptic nuScenes, summarizing many technical details that have hitherto not been revealed in academic publications. Furthermore, we trace how the influence of nuScenes impacted a large number of other datasets that were released later and how it defined numerous standards that are used by the community to this day. Finally, we present an overview of both official and unofficial tasks using the nuScenes dataset and review major methodological developments, thereby offering a comprehensive survey of the autonomous driving literature, with a particular focus on nuScenes.

The essence of simultaneously solving cross-domain tasks is to enhance the general-izability of the encoder.

CAR-Scenes is a frame-level dataset for autonomous driving that enables training and evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) for interpretable, scene-level understanding. We annotate 5,192 images drawn from Argoverse 1, Cityscapes, KITTI, and nuScenes using a 28-key category/sub-category knowledge base covering environment, road geometry, background-vehicle behavior, ego-vehicle behavior, vulnerable road users, sensor states, and a discrete severity scale (1-10), totaling 350+ leaf attributes. Labels are produced by a GPT-4o-assisted vision-language pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification; we release the exact prompts, post-processing rules, and per-field baseline model performance. CAR-Scenes also provides attribute co-occurrence graphs and JSONL records that support semantic retrieval, dataset triage, and risk-aware scenario mining across sources. To calibrate task difficulty, we include reproducible, non-benchmark baselines, notably a LoRA-tuned Qwen2-VL-2B with deterministic decoding, evaluated via scalar accuracy, micro-averaged F1 for list attributes, and severity MAE/RMSE on a fixed validation split. We publicly release the annotation and analysis scripts, including graph construction and evaluation scripts, to enable explainable, data-centric workflows for future intelligent vehicles. Dataset: https://github.com/Croquembouche/CAR-Scenes

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving heavily relies on closed-loop simulation, where perception, planning, and control are jointly trained and evaluated in interactive environments. Yet, most existing datasets are collected from the real world under non-interactive conditions, primarily supporting open-loop learning while offering limited value for closed-loop testing. Due to the lack of standardized, large-scale, and thoroughly verified datasets to facilitate learning of meaningful intermediate representations, such as bird's-eye-view (BEV) features, closed-loop E2E models remain far behind even simple rule-based baselines. To address this challenge, we introduce nuCarla, a large-scale, nuScenes-style BEV perception dataset built within the CARLA simulator. nuCarla features (1) full compatibility with the nuScenes format, enabling seamless transfer of real-world perception models; (2) a dataset scale comparable to nuScenes, but with more balanced class distributions; (3) direct usability for closed-loop simulation deployment; and (4) high-performance BEV backbones that achieve state-of-the-art detection results. By providing both data and models as open benchmarks, nuCarla substantially accelerates closed-loop E2E development, paving the way toward reliable and safety-aware research in autonomous driving.

The remarkable progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on a variety of tasks has raised interest in their application to automated driving. However, for these models to be trusted in such a safety-critical domain, they must first possess robust perception capabilities, i.e., they must be capable of understanding a traffic scene, which can often be highly complex, with many things happening simultaneously. Moreover, since critical objects and agents in traffic scenes are often at long distances, we require systems with not only strong perception capabilities at close distances (up to 20 meters), but also at long (30+ meters) range. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the perception capabilities of these models in isolation from other skills like reasoning or advanced world knowledge. Distance-Annotated Traffic Perception Question Answering (DTPQA) is a Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark designed specifically for this purpose: it can be used to evaluate the perception systems of VLMs in traffic scenarios using trivial yet crucial questions relevant to driving decisions. It consists of two parts: a synthetic benchmark (DTP-Synthetic) created using a simulator, and a real-world benchmark (DTP-Real) built on top of existing images of real traffic scenes. Additionally, DTPQA includes distance annotations, i.e., how far the object in question is from the camera. More specifically, each DTPQA sample consists of (at least): (a) an image, (b) a question, (c) the ground truth answer, and (d) the distance of the object in question, enabling analysis of how VLM performance degrades with increasing object distance. In this article, we provide the dataset itself along with the Python scripts used to create it, which can be used to generate additional data of the same kind.

If you ran experiments... (a) Did you include the code, data, and instructions needed to reproduce the main experimental results (either in the supplemental material or as a URL)? [No] Our code is proprietary, but we will release the code once the paper is accepted.

Abstract-- We challenge the long-standing assumption that exhaustive scene modeling is required for high-performance end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD). Inspired by cognitive science, we propose that effective planning arises not from reconstructing the world, but from the co-evolution of belief and intent within a minimal set of semantically rich tokens. Experiments on the nuPlan benchmark (720 scenarios, 11k+ samples) reveal three principles: (1) sparse intent tokens alone achieve 0.487 m ADE, demonstrating strong performance without future prediction; (2) conditioning trajectory decoding on predicted future tokens reduces ADE to 0.382 m, a 21.6% improvement, showing that performance emerges from cognitive planning; and (3) explicit reconstruction loss degrades performance, confirming that task-driven belief-intent co-evolution suffices under reliable perception inputs. Crucially, we observe the emergence of cognitive consistency: through prolonged training, the model spontaneously develops stable token dynamics that balance current perception (belief) and future goals (intent). This process, accompanied by "temporal fuzziness," enables robustness under uncertainty and continuous self-optimization. Our work establishes a new paradigm: intelligence lies not in pixel fidelity, but in the tokenized duality of belief and intent. Note: Numerical comparisons with methods reporting results on nuScenes are indicative only, as nuPlan presents a more challenging planning-focused evaluation.

Autonomous vehicles rely on detailed and accurate environmental information to operate safely. High definition (HD) maps offer a promising solution, but their high maintenance cost poses a significant barrier to scalable deployment. This challenge is addressed by online HD map construction methods, which generate local HD maps from live sensor data. However, these methods are inherently limited by the short perception range of onboard sensors. To overcome this limitation and improve general performance, recent approaches have explored the use of standard definition (SD) maps as prior, which are significantly easier to maintain. We propose SDTagNet, the first online HD map construction method that fully utilizes the information of widely available SD maps, like OpenStreetMap, to enhance far range detection accuracy. Our approach introduces two key innovations. First, in contrast to previous work, we incorporate not only polyline SD map data with manually selected classes, but additional semantic information in the form of textual annotations. In this way, we enrich SD vector map tokens with NLP-derived features, eliminating the dependency on predefined specifications or exhaustive class taxonomies. Second, we introduce a point-level SD map encoder together with orthogonal element identifiers to uniformly integrate all types of map elements. Experiments on Argoverse 2 and nuScenes show that this boosts map perception performance by up to +5.9 mAP (+45%) w.r.t. map construction without priors and up to +3.2 mAP (+20%) w.r.t. previous approaches that already use SD map priors. Code is available at https://github.com/immel-f/SDTagNet