mmWalk: Towards Multi-modal Multi-view Walking Assistance

Kedi Ying, Ruiping Liu, Chongyan Chen, Mingzhe Tao, Hao Shi, Kailun Yang, Jiaming Zhang, Rainer Stiefelhagen

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Datasets and Benchmarks Track

Walking assistance in extreme or complex environments remains a significant challenge for people with blindness or low vision (BLV), largely due to the lack of a holistic scene understanding. Motivated by the real-world needs of the BLV community, we build mmWalk, a simulated multi-modal dataset that integrates multi-view sensor and accessibility-oriented features for outdoor safe navigation. Our dataset comprises $120$ manually controlled, scenario-categorized walking trajectories with $62k$ synchronized frames. It contains over $559k$ panoramic images across RGB, depth, and semantic modalities. Furthermore, to emphasize real-world relevance, each trajectory involves outdoor corner cases and accessibility-specific landmarks for BLV users. Additionally, we generate mmWalkVQA, a VQA benchmark with over $69k$ visual question-answer triplets across $9$ categories tailored for safe and informed walking assistance. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) using zero- and few-shot settings and found they struggle with our risk assessment and navigational tasks. We validate our mmWalk-finetuned model on real-world datasets and show the effectiveness of our dataset for advancing multi-modal walking assistance.