The 10th AI City Challenge, held alongside ECCV 2026, celebrates a decade of benchmarking for intelligent transportation, smart cities, and physical AI. Since its 2017 inception focused on vehicle detection, classification, and tracking, the challenge has expanded into a comprehensive benchmark suite covering multi‑camera perception, multimodal reasoning, synthetic‑to‑real learning, generative forecasting, and privacy‑preserving evaluation. The 2026 edition saw 325 registered teams from 26 countries, with six main tracks—spanning multi‑camera 3D perception, transportation safety captioning and VQA, traffic anomaly reasoning, text‑based person anomaly search, generative traffic video forecasting, and cross‑city object detection—plus two out‑of‑domain leaderboards for fisheye traffic‑violation understanding and pedestrian situated‑intent VQA.
arXiv:2608. 13031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic video understanding has become an important problem in intelligent transportation, as road videos provide direct evidence for accidents, violations, and interactions between vehicles and vulnerable road users.
arXiv:2606. 15749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics.
arXiv:2606. 07708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce a dataset and benchmark for cross-view urban traffic perception built from synchronized ego-centric bicycle videos and aerial drone videos recorded at real urban intersections.
arXiv:2608. 16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present RISE (Roadside Infrastructure Sequence Understanding and Evaluation), a framework spanning metric 3D tracking and structured vision-language reasoning in roadside sequences.
arXiv:2602. 23499v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Collecting a high-quality dataset is a critical task that demands meticulous attention to detail, as overlooking certain aspects can render the entire dataset unusable.
arXiv:2510. 03314v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring the safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists, remains a critical challenge, as conventional infrastructure-based measures are often insufficient in dynamic urban environments.
arXiv:2607. 08745v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Vision-Language Models, Large Language Models, and Multimodal Large Language Models have improved autonomous driving tasks such as scene understanding, decision making, trajectory prediction, and visual question answering.
The paper proposes a modular training pipeline for zero‑shot cross‑city object detection that combines a multi‑dataset pre‑training strategy with class‑agnostic objectness distillation and a domain‑resilient augmentation stream featuring a Grayworld transformation. Applied to the RF‑DETR detector, the approach reduces cross‑city distribution gaps while using only 16 GB GPU memory, achieving a 24.29‑point mAP improvement and 1st place on the AI City Challenge Track 6 leaderboard. The authors provide code and data at the referenced GitHub repository.
arXiv:2607. 00283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous vehicles must safely navigate complex environments where planning-critical agents may be hidden from view.
The paper presents a decoupled framework for sim-to-real traffic scene understanding, separating semantic fact extraction from caption generation. It uses a frozen V-JEPA encoder for predictive scene representations and a lightweight Llama-based predictor for VQA, followed by a training-free structured refinement that leverages statistical priors, inter-question relationships, and temporal consistency. The refined facts are then fed to Qwen3-VL-8B to produce pedestrian and vehicle descriptions, achieving top performance on the 2026 AI City Challenge Track 2 benchmark with 87.09% VQA accuracy and an overall S2 score of 60.0853.
arXiv:2609.09396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) advance toward physical deployment, the focus has remained on action-oriented Embodied AI evaluated on subject-centric...
arXiv:2505.12254v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing visual place recognition (VPR) datasets predominantly rely on vehicle-mounted imagery, offer limited multimodal diversity, and under...