nuReasoning: A Reasoning-Centric Dataset and Benchmark for Long-Tail Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Reasoning is essential for autonomous driving (AD) in long-tail scenarios, where vehicles must apply commonsense knowledge, understand spatial relations, infer agent interactions, and make safe decisions. However, existing AD datasets and benchmarks mainly target perception, prediction, or planning, and provide limited supervision for reasoning over realistic long-tail driving scenes. We introduce nuReasoning, a large-scale real-world dataset and benchmark for reasoning-centric AD. Following the lineage of nuScenes and nuPlan, nuReasoning advances real-world AD datasets and benchmarks toward reasoning in long-tail driving scenarios. The dataset contains 20,000 clips, each 20 seconds long, collected across multiple cities, with synchronized multi-camera images, LiDAR data, HD maps, object annotations, and human-verified reasoning annotations spanning Spatial Reasoning, Decision Reasoning, and Counterfactual Reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that focus primarily on visual question answering, nuReasoning supports both reasoning evaluation and planning evaluation, enabling a direct study of how reasoning supervision affects driving performance. Experiments show that fine-tuning VLMs on nuReasoning substantially improves driving-specific question answering, while incorporating reasoning supervision into VLA training improves planning performance even when textual reasoning outputs are disabled at inference time. These results establish nuReasoning as a foundation for evaluating and improving robust, interpretable, reasoning-driven AD systems in realistic long-tail settings.