This paper addresses the problem of predicting hazards that drivers may encounter while driving a car. We formulate it as a task of anticipating impending accidents using a single input image captured by car dashcams. Unlike existing approaches to driving hazard prediction that rely on computational simulations or anomaly detection from videos, this study focuses on high-level inference from static images. The problem needs predicting and reasoning about future events based on uncertain observations, which falls under visual abductive reasoning. To enable research in this understudied area, a new dataset named the DHPR (Driving Hazard Prediction and Reasoning) dataset is created. The dataset consists of 15K dashcam images of street scenes, and each image is associated with a tuple containing car speed, a hypothesized hazard description, and visual entities present in the scene. These are annotated by human annotators, who identify risky scenes and provide descriptions of potential accidents that could occur a few seconds later. We present several baseline methods and evaluate their performance on our dataset, identifying remaining issues and discussing future directions. This study contributes to the field by introducing a novel problem formulation and dataset, enabling researchers to explore the potential of multi-modal AI for driving hazard prediction.
Visual abductive reasoning aims to make likely explanations for visual observations. We propose a simple yet effective Region Conditioned Adaptation, a hybrid parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that equips the frozen CLIP with the ability to infer explanations from local visual cues. We encode ``local hints'' and ``global contexts'' into visual prompts of the CLIP model separately at fine and coarse-grained levels. Adapters are used for fine-tuning CLIP models for downstream tasks and we design a new attention adapter, that directly steers the focus of the attention map with trainable query and key projections of a frozen CLIP model. Finally, we train our new model with a modified contrastive loss to regress the visual feature simultaneously toward features of literal description and plausible explanations. The loss enables CLIP to maintain both perception and reasoning abilities. Experiments on the Sherlock visual abductive reasoning benchmark show that the RCA significantly outstands previous SOTAs, ranking the \nth{1} on the leaderboards (e.g., Human Acc: RCA 31.74 \textit{vs} CPT-CLIP 29.58, higher =better). We also validate the RCA is generalizable to local perception benchmarks like RefCOCO. We open-source our project at \textit{\color{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/LUNAProject22/RPA}}}.
Abductive reasoning seeks the likeliest possible explanation for partial observations. Although abduction is frequently employed in human daily reasoning, it is rarely explored in computer vision literature. In this paper, we propose a new task and dataset, Visual Abductive Reasoning (VAR), for examining abductive reasoning ability of machine intelligence in everyday visual situations. Given an incomplete set of visual events, AI systems are required to not only describe what is observed, but also infer the hypothesis that can best explain the visual premise. Based on our large-scale VAR dataset, we devise a strong baseline model, Reasoner (causal-and-cascaded reasoning Transformer). First, to capture the causal structure of the observations, a contextualized directional position embedding strategy is adopted in the encoder, that yields discriminative representations for the premise and hypothesis. Then, multiple decoders are cascaded to generate and progressively refine the premise and hypothesis sentences. The prediction scores of the sentences are used to guide cross-sentence information flow in the cascaded reasoning procedure. Our VAR benchmarking results show that Reasoner surpasses many famous video-language models, while still being far behind human performance. This work is expected to foster future efforts in the reasoning-beyond-observation paradigm.