STRIDE: Evaluating Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Driving Edge Cases

Lieqi Liu, Rui gao, Jia-Chen Gu, Wenbo Hu, Zhaobin Mo +4

In autonomous driving, perceiving surrounding objects is not enough: failing to understand how they move and interact over time can lead to dangerous decisions. Evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) therefore requires testing whether they connect past spatial observations to future consequences. Yet existing benchmarks often assess edge cases through basic perception questions or test temporal understanding in simple scenarios, leaving complex spatiotemporal reasoning underexplored. We introduce STRIDE (SpatioTemporal Reasoning In Driving Edge Cases), an object-centric benchmark for long-tail, safety-critical driving scenarios. STRIDE covers six task families: spatial perception, spatial understanding, temporal memory, temporal extrapolation, trajectory prediction, and scene-context awareness. It pairs multiple-choice questions probing individual spatiotemporal judgments with related free-form visual question answering (VQA) requiring detailed scene explanations and justifications of driving decisions. We prioritize scenes with unusual object behaviors and complex traffic interactions, generate reference answers from structured dataset annotations through automated procedures,…