# WaymoQA: A Multi-View Visual Question Answering Dataset for Safety-Critical Reasoning in Autonomous Driving

Source: [WaymoQA: A Multi-View Visual Question Answering Dataset for Safety-Critical Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/69268992d6b0dd33429303e3>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-02-13T05:00:04.183Z

Authors: Seungjun Yu, Seonho Lee, Namho Kim, Jaeyo Shin, Junsung Park, Wonjeong Ryu, Raehyuk Jung, Hyunjung Shim

Published: 2025-11-25T07:47:27.000Z

## Abstract

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong understanding of driving scenes, drawing interest in their application to autonomous driving. However, high-level reasoning in safety-critical scenarios, where avoiding one traffic risk can create another, remains a major challenge. Such reasoning is often infeasible with only a single front view and requires a comprehensive view of the environment, which we achieve through multi-view inputs. We define Safety-Critical Reasoning as a new task that leverages multi-view inputs to address this challenge. Then, we distill Safety-Critical Reasoning into two stages: first resolve the immediate risk, then mitigate the decision-induced downstream risks. To support this, we introduce WaymoQA, a dataset of 35,000 human-annotated question-answer pairs covering complex, high-risk driving scenarios. The dataset includes multiple-choice and open-ended formats across both image and video modalities. Experiments reveal that existing MLLMs underperform in safety-critical scenarios compared to normal scenes, but fine-tuning with WaymoQA significantly improves their reasoning ability, highlighting the effectiveness of our dataset in developing safer and more reasoning-capable driving agents. Our code and data are provided in https://github.com/sjyu001/WaymoQA

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20022>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20022.pdf>)
