Papers › Localization Is All You Evaluate: Data Leakage in Online Mapping Datasets and How to Fix It

Localization Is All You Evaluate: Data Leakage in Online Mapping Datasets and How to Fix It

11 Dec 2023CVPR 2024 1arXiv:2312.06420archive 2025-07-28

Adam Lilja, Junsheng Fu, Erik Stenborg, Lars Hammarstrand

The task of online mapping is to predict a local map using current sensor observations, e.g. from lidar and camera, without relying on a pre-built map. State-of-the-art methods are based on supervised learning and are trained predominantly using two datasets: nuScenes and Argoverse 2. However, these datasets revisit the same geographic locations across training, validation, and test sets. Specifically, over $80$% of nuScenes and $40$% of Argoverse 2 validation and test samples are less than $5$ m from a training sample. At test time, the methods are thus evaluated more on how well they localize within a memorized implicit map built from the training data than on extrapolating to unseen locations. Naturally, this data leakage causes inflated performance numbers and we propose geographically disjoint data splits to reveal the true performance in unseen environments. Experimental results show that methods perform considerably worse, some dropping more than $45$ mAP, when trained and evaluated on proper data splits. Additionally, a reassessment of prior design choices reveals diverging conclusions from those based on the original split. Notably, the impact of lifting methods and the support from auxiliary tasks (e.g., depth supervision) on performance appears less substantial or follows a different trajectory than previously perceived. Splits can be found at https://github.com/LiljaAdam/geographical-splits

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

2 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 2 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 2 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from liljaadam/geographical-splits. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections