RoadSceneBench: A Lightweight Benchmark for Mid-Level Road Scene Understanding

Understanding mid-level road semantics—the structural and contextual cues that bridge low-level perception and high-level planning—is essential for reliable autonomous driving and digital map construction. However, existing benchmarks primarily target perception tasks such as detection or segmentation, overlooking the reasoning capabilities required to infer road topology and dynamic scene structure. To address this gap, we present RoadSceneBench, a lightweight yet information-rich benchmark designed to evaluate and advance visual reasoning in complex road environments. Unlike large-scale perception datasets, RoadSceneBench emphasizes relational understanding and structural consistency, encouraging models to capture the underlying logic of real-world road scenes. Furthermore, to enhance reasoning reliability, we propose Hierarchical Relational Reward Propagation with Temporal Consistency (HRRP-T)—a training framework for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in which reward signals adaptively promote spatial coherence and semantic alignment throughout the reasoning process. This paradigm enables models to move beyond static recognition toward geometry-aware and temporally consistent reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse road configurations. RoadSceneBench thus provides a compact yet powerful foundation for studying mid-level road semantics and fostering structure-aware autonomous perception. Our dataset will be made publicly available in the final version.