doScenes Instructed Driving Challenge

The doScenes Instructed Driving Challenge evaluates whether natural language instructions can improve trajectory prediction for autonomous driving. Traditional models rely on past motion and scene context; doScenes adds human-authored intent descriptions so models can predict with privileged information.

This challenge is built on doScenes, an instruction-augmented extension of nuScenes. Instructions cover maneuvers such as lane changes, turns, stopping, yielding, and speed adjustments, with multiple annotators providing diverse phrasings.

Task Definition

Given:

• Visual scene input from multiple cameras
• Historical trajectory information (past 2 seconds)
• High-definition map data
• Natural language instruction describing the intended maneuver

Participants must predict the ego vehicle’s future trajectory over the next 6 seconds. The key research question is whether models can effectively leverage the language instruction to improve prediction accuracy compared to baselines that use only visual, historical, and map information.

Evaluation Metrics

Submissions are evaluated using standard trajectory prediction metrics:

• Average Displacement Error (ADE): Mean L2 distance between predicted and ground-truth positions across all time steps.
• Final Displacement Error (FDE): L2 distance between predicted and ground-truth positions at the final time step.
• Instruction Conditioning Gain (Delta ADE): Improvement in ADE relative to a history-only baseline, measuring the benefit of incorporating language instructions.

ADE reporting specification: ADE is computed as mean Average Displacement Error. We report the Q97.5-filtered mean, removing the top 2.5% highest-error scenes to avoid catastrophic outliers.

The Instruction Conditioning Gain is computed as:

Delta ADE = ADE_baseline − ADE_instruction (1)

Positive values indicate improvement from using language instructions.

Evaluation Tracks

Participants may submit to one or more tracks:

1. Full Multimodal: Uses all available inputs (cameras, history, map, and language instruction).
2. Language + History: Uses only historical trajectory and language instruction (no visual input).
3. Ablation: Participants report results with and without language conditioning to demonstrate the instruction benefit.

Goals and Expected Outcomes

The doScenes Instructed Driving Challenge aims to:

1. Establish instruction-conditioned prediction as a research paradigm: Demonstrate that language instructions provide actionable information for trajectory prediction.
2. Benchmark vision-language models for driving: Evaluate how well current VLM architectures can ground natural language instructions in driving behavior.
3. Quantify the instruction benefit: Measure the gap between history-only and instruction-conditioned prediction, providing motivation for human-in-the-loop autonomy systems.
4. Build community: Foster collaboration between the computer vision, NLP, and autonomous driving research communities.

We hypothesize that instruction-conditioned models will show significant improvements over history-only baselines, particularly for:

• Ambiguous scenarios where multiple future trajectories are plausible
• Complex maneuvers requiring multi-step planning
• Rare or unusual driving situations

Leaderboard

Test-set leaderboard for instruction-conditioned trajectory prediction. Baselines are listed first.

Baselines are from the paper: Martinez-Sanchez et al., Natural Language Instructions for Scene-Responsive Human-in-the-Loop Motion Planning in Autonomous Driving using Vision-Language-Action Models, arXiv:2602.04184, 2026.

Dataset & Data Splits

doScenes extends the nuScenes training and validation splits with human-authored instructions. Instructions are written by multiple annotators to capture natural variation in phrasing.

Instructions cover a variety of maneuvers including:

• Lane changes (left/right)
• Turns at intersections
• Proceeding straight
• Stopping and yielding
• Speed adjustments

The diversity of annotators ensures that models must handle natural variation in instruction phrasing, rather than memorizing specific templates.

Dataset Statistics

Dataset Splits and Evaluation Protocol

The doScenes benchmark uses the standard nuScenes dataset splits as the basis for training and evaluation.

The doScenes annotations provided in the repository correspond to scenes from these splits.

Although the nuScenes validation split includes ground-truth annotations, it must be treated as a held-out test set for the purposes of this challenge.

Fair Evaluation Requirements

To ensure fair evaluation:

• Ground-truth future trajectories from the validation split must not be used during training.
• The validation split must be used only for generating predictions for evaluation.
• Participants must train their models exclusively on the nuScenes train split.
• Predictions must be generated for the nuScenes val split and submitted for evaluation.
• Teams are expected to submit reproducible code that adheres to this protocol.

Required Inputs

All required inputs for prediction, including historical trajectories, sensor data, maps, and language instructions, can be obtained by combining the standard nuScenes dataset with the doScenes annotation files provided in the repository.

Submission Instructions

Ready to submit? Use the official submission form.

Submission Checklist

• Prediction CSV file in the required format
• Public code repository link
• Paper PDF link
• Submitted papers are encouraged to follow the CVPR paper format

Workshop Participation

Participation in the workshop is not required in order to complete the challenge. However, teams are encouraged to attend if possible. Details about online participation will be posted once that information becomes available.

Key Dates

FAQ

Ethical Considerations

The doScenes dataset is built upon nuScenes, which uses public road data. All videos are anonymized with no identifiable faces or license plates. Language annotations are collected consensually and anonymously for research purposes. We encourage participants to consider the broader implications of instruction-conditioned autonomy, including:

• Safety in deployment
• Handling of adversarial or conflicting instructions
• Accountability when human instructions influence autonomous behavior

Contact

Resources

• Dataset and project page: https://github.com/rossgreer/doScenes

@inproceedings{roy2025doscenes,
      title={doScenes: An Autonomous Driving Dataset with Natural Language Instruction for Human Interaction and Vision-Language Navigation},
      author={Parthib Roy and Srinivasa Perisetla and Shashank Shriram and Harsha Krishnaswamy and Aryan Keskar and Ross Greer},
      booktitle={2025 IEEE 28th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)},
      pages={1651--1658},
      year={2025},
      organization={IEEE},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05893},
}

@inproceedings{martinezsanchez2026naturallanguage,
  title={Natural Language Instructions for Scene-Responsive Human-in-the-Loop Motion Planning in Autonomous Driving using Vision-Language-Action Models},
  author={Angel Martinez-Sanchez and Parthib Roy and Ross Greer},
  booktitle={2026 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)},
  year={2026},
  note={To appear},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04184}
}

@inproceedings{greer2026visionlanguagenovelrepresentations,
      title={Vision and language: Novel Representations and Artificial intelligence for Driving Scene Safety Assessment and Autonomous Vehicle Planning},
      author={Ross Greer and Maitrayee Keskar and Angel Martinez-Sanchez and Parthib Roy and Shashank Shriram and Mohan Trivedi},
      booktitle={Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference},
      year={2026},
      note={To appear},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07680}
}

@inproceedings{greer2026lookinglisteninginsideoutside,
      title={Looking and Listening Inside and Outside: Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems for Driver Safety Assessment and Intelligent Vehicle Decision-Making},
      author={Ross Greer and Laura Fleig and Maitrayee Keskar and Erika Maquiling and Giovanni Tapia Lopez and Angel Martinez-Sanchez and Parthib Roy and Jake Rattigan and Mira Sur and Alejandra Vidrio and Thomas Marcotte and Mohan Trivedi},
      booktitle={Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference},
      year={2026},
      note={To appear},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07668}
}