arXiv Computation and Language

Reason or Recite: Complementary Specialists with an LLM Judge for Traffic Anomaly Reasoning

arXiv AI
Aug 14

UniTraffic-Agent: Unified Traffic Video Reasoning for AI City Challenge 2026 Track 3 with Two Out-of-Domain Evaluations

arXiv:2608. 13031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic video understanding has become an important problem in intelligent transportation, as road videos provide direct evidence for accidents, violations, and interactions between vehicles and vulnerable road users.

By Peng Li, Qianqian Xu, Shilong Bao, Yangbangyan Jiang, Qingming Huang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

TAU-Agent: An Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Traffic Anomaly Understanding

TAU-Agent is a retrieval‑augmented framework designed for traffic anomaly understanding in transportation videos. It uses a central retrieval agent to coordinate a Video Captioning Tool and an Open‑Vocabulary Tracking Tool, gathering captions, temporal intervals, and object trajectories relevant to a query. The collected evidence, along with sampled frames and the query, is fed into a fine‑tuned vision‑language model that reasons and generates an answer. TAU-Agent was evaluated on the AI City Challenge 2026 benchmarks, achieving notable scores across multiple tracks and ranking second, twelfth, and fifth respectively.

By Yuqiang Lin, Yan Shi, Sam Lockyer, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Adrian Evans, Wenbin Li, Yinhai Wang, Nic Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

From Detection to Understanding: TAR and TAR-Bench for Multi-Task Traffic Anomaly Reasoning

The paper introduces TAR (Traffic Anomaly Reasoning) and its evaluation suite TAR-Bench, designed to train and assess video‑language models on tasks beyond simple anomaly detection. TAR offers 44,040 chain‑of‑thought annotations covering 10 tasks across 3,670 CCTV videos, while TAR‑Bench supplies 960 human‑curated test annotations from 80 clips of 17 YouTube videos. Experiments show that strong question‑answering performance does not guarantee temporal or scene reasoning, and multi‑task fine‑tuning on TAR consistently improves model scores, with a 10‑task model outperforming its zero‑shot baseline by 21.4 points. The datasets serve as the official training and evaluation data for AI City Challenge 2026 Track 3.

By Han Zhang, Yilin Zhao, Zaid Pervaiz Bhat, Zheng Tang, Varun Praveen, Vidya N. Murali, David C. Anastasiu, Tomasz Kornuta
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Sim-to-Real Traffic Scene Understanding by Decoupling Semantics from Caption Generation with V-JEPA

The paper presents a decoupled framework for sim-to-real traffic scene understanding, separating semantic fact extraction from caption generation. It uses a frozen V-JEPA encoder for predictive scene representations and a lightweight Llama-based predictor for VQA, followed by a training-free structured refinement that leverages statistical priors, inter-question relationships, and temporal consistency. The refined facts are then fed to Qwen3-VL-8B to produce pedestrian and vehicle descriptions, achieving top performance on the 2026 AI City Challenge Track 2 benchmark with 87.09% VQA accuracy and an overall S2 score of 60.0853.

By Nguyen Hoai Thuong Bui, Thanh Nguyen Vo, Trinh Tra Giang Nguyen, Ha Duc Bui
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 21

CAViAR: A Causal Video Dataset for Fine-Grained Accident Reasoning in Real-World Scenarios

arXiv:2608. 19380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While modern autonomous driving systems excel at perception tasks such as object detection and trajectory prediction, they lack the high-level causal reasoning required to interpret traffic accidents.

By Sparsh Garg, Yi-Wen Chen, Vijay Kumar B G, Abhishek Aich
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 26

StateBridge: Phase- and Track-Grounded Reasoning for Synthetic-to-Real Traffic Video Captioning and VQA

arXiv:2610.31898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traffic safety videos provide rich evidence for understanding interactions between pedestrians and vehicles, but synthetic-to-real evaluation makes thi...

By Blessing Agyei Kyem, Richard Dzinyela, Joshua Kofi Asamoah, Eugene Denteh, Andrews Danyo, Solomon Owusu-Ansah, Dickson Gyimah Asiedu, Armstrong Aboah
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Incentivizing Vision Language Models to Search for Long Video Question Answering

arXiv:2607. 02959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce VSeek, an agentic framework that transforms long-video question answering (LVQA) from a passive, single-pass perception task into a multi-turn retrieval process.

By Harsh Goel, S P Sharan, Sahil Shah, Minkyu Choi, Joungbin An, Kristen Grauman, Sandeep P. Chinchali