Abstract
Autonomous driving has made remarkable progress, with recent AI advances enabling commercial deployments that are reshaping urban mobility. Yet the field remains far from its universal social promise: autonomous systems that can operate robustly anywhere, anytime, for anyone. We posit that this gap is not merely a modeling problem, but a problem of the prevailing data paradigm. Current research relies heavily on a few benchmark datasets with limited spatial and scenario coverage, even though the community has collectively produced over 600 autonomous driving datasets across nearly 50 countries. However, this abundance has not translated into broad research impact: most datasets remain significantly underused due to fragmentation, limited visibility, incompatible protocols, and benchmark incentives that concentrate attention on a few dominant datasets. We therefore argue that autonomous driving research requires a collaborative, community-driven data paradigm. Such a paradigm would improve the discovery, reuse, integration, and evaluation of diverse datasets; make underexplored data easier and more rewarding to study; and lower the barrier for new contributors. We outline its key principles, illustrate an early realization, and call for collaboration across academia and industry to transform fragmented datasets into shared community infrastructure for anytime-anywhere autonomy.
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Yoo, J., Huang, Z., Luo, K. Z., Mai, Z., Wu, Q., Hariharan, B., Campbell, M., & Chao, W. L. (2026). Autonomous Driving Research Requires a Community-Driven Data Paradigm. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/autonomous-driving-research-requires-a-community-driven-data-paradigm
MLA 9
Yoo, Jinsu, et al. "Autonomous Driving Research Requires a Community-Driven Data Paradigm." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/autonomous-driving-research-requires-a-community-driven-data-paradigm.
Chicago (author–date)
Yoo, Jinsu, Zanming Huang, Katie Z. Luo, Zheda Mai, Qiyuan Wu, Bharath Hariharan, Mark Campbell, and Wei-Lun Chao. 2026. "Autonomous Driving Research Requires a Community-Driven Data Paradigm." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/autonomous-driving-research-requires-a-community-driven-data-paradigm.
Harvard
Yoo, J., Huang, Z., Luo, K. Z., Mai, Z., Wu, Q., Hariharan, B., Campbell, M. and Chao, W. L. (2026) 'Autonomous Driving Research Requires a Community-Driven Data Paradigm', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/autonomous-driving-research-requires-a-community-driven-data-paradigm.
Vancouver
Yoo J, Huang Z, Luo KZ, Mai Z, Wu Q, Hariharan B, et al. Autonomous Driving Research Requires a Community-Driven Data Paradigm. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/autonomous-driving-research-requires-a-community-driven-data-paradigm
IEEE
J. Yoo, Z. Huang, K. Z. Luo, Z. Mai, Q. Wu, B. Hariharan, M. Campbell, and W. L. Chao, "Autonomous Driving Research Requires a Community-Driven Data Paradigm," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/autonomous-driving-research-requires-a-community-driven-data-paradigm.