Christian Kinzig | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Creating Impactful Autonomous Driving Datasets: A Strategic Guide from Research Gap to Benchmark

Well-designed autonomous driving datasets have fundamentally shaped research progress, yet existing literature primarily describes what datasets contain rather than how to strategically design impactful ones. This is especially limiting for small and medium-sized labs and startups that cannot afford to misallocate scarce resources. We argue that impactful dataset creation begins with a diagnosis: whether a research question is blocked by a data problem or an evaluation problem, and proceeds by selecting the minimal data operator(s) that closes the resulting gap, recording new data only when no cheaper operator(s) suffices. We analyze the evolution of major autonomous driving (AD) datasets through this lens and distill a strategic framework spanning gap identification, operator choice, sensor suite design, and annotation strategy. We ground the framework in a running case study of our KITScenes dataset family. The datasets are available at: https://kitscenes.com/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Reasoning models do not yet follow their reasoning in autonomous driving: The KITScenes LongTail Dataset

Handling rare events is the central open challenge in autonomous driving. Reasoning models, which generate explicit chains of reasoning before acting, promise to generalize to such events. Here we show that these models frequently do not follow their own reasoning: the actions they state in their reasoning often diverge from the actions they ultimately execute. We introduce KITScenes LongTail, a curated dataset of rare driving scenarios to quantify this divergence through a measure of semantic reasoning-action coherence. We find that incoherence is widespread across current general-purpose and domain-specific models. Strikingly, when reasoned actions and executed actions disagree, the reasoning is usually right: extracting actions from the reasoning trace and executing them through a kinematic model enforces coherence and typically improves motion planning. These results suggest that the reasoning capabilities of current models exceed what their actions reveal, and that coherently acting on stated reasoning is a prerequisite for trustworthy autonomous driving. Our dataset and evaluation space are available at: https://hf.co/datasets/kit-mrt/kitscenes-longtail

cs.CV↗