Answering “Where is the X button?” with “It’s next to the Y button” is unhelpful if the user knows neither location. Useful answers require obvious landmarks as a reference point. We address this by generating from a vehicle dashboard diagram a spatial knowledge graph (SKG) that shows the spatial relationship between a dashboard component and its nearby landmarks and using the SKG to help answer questions. We evaluate three distinct generation pipelines (Per-Attribute, Per-Component, and a Single-Shot baseline) to create the SKG using Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). On a new 65-vehicle dataset, we demonstrate that a decomposed Per-Component pipeline is the most effective strategy for generating a high-quality SKG; the graph produced by this method, when evaluated with a novel Significance score, identifies landmarks achieving 71.3% agreement with human annotators. This work enables downstream QA systems to provide more intuitive, landmark-based answers.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly power car assistants, enabling natural language interaction for tasks such as maintenance, troubleshooting, and operational guidance. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves grounding using vehicle manuals, evaluating response quality remains a key challenge. Traditional metrics like BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture critical aspects such as factual accuracy and information coverage. We propose GEAR, a fully automated, reference-based evaluation framework for car assistant systems. GEAR uses LLMs as evaluators to compare assistant responses against ground-truth counterparts, assessing coverage, correctness, and other dimensions of answer quality. To enable fine-grained evaluation, both responses are decomposed into key facts and labeled as essential, optional, or safety-critical using LLMs. The evaluator then determines which of these facts are correct and covered. Experiments show that GEAR aligns closely with human annotations, offering a scalable and reliable solution for evaluating car assistants.

To enhance a question-answering system for automotive drivers, we tackle the problem of automatic generation of icon image descriptions. The descriptions can match the driver’s query about the icon appearing on the dashboard and tell the driver what is happening so that they may take an appropriate action. We use three state-of-the-art large vision-language models to generate both visual and functional descriptions based on the icon image and its context information in the car manual. Both zero-shot and few-shot prompts are used. We create a dataset containing over 400 icons with their ground-truth descriptions and use it to evaluate model-generated descriptions across several performance metrics. Our evaluation shows that two of these models (GPT-4o and Claude 3.5) performed well on this task, while the third model (LLaVA-NEXT) performs poorly.