arXiv · 2508.05852
Interpretable Modeling of Driver Attention Shifts with a Vision-Language Model
Abstract
Driver gaze is commonly modeled as a spatial heatmap, but heatmaps alone are difficult for humans to interpret because they do not explain which road object or region is being monitored or why an attention shift may matter. This study examines whether minimal human-grounded supervision can steer a vision--language model toward interpretable descriptions of driver attention shifts. Using selected high-change gaze moments from the Berkeley DeepDrive-Attention dataset, we compare zero-shot, one-shot, and LoRA fine-tuned VLM conditions against human-refined reference descriptions and expert ratings. Results show that fine-tuning with 80 expert-refined attention examples improves ROUGE-L, METEOR, Entity Alignment F1, and Human Alignment Score relative to unsteered VLM outputs. The findings suggest that language-based descriptions can complement gaze heatmaps by making driver attention more accessible for human-factors analysis, driver-monitoring review, and situation-awareness support.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Kaiser Hamid, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Peihang Li, Nade Liang. 2026-06-02. Interpretable Modeling of Driver Attention Shifts with a Vision-Language Model. https://doi.org/10.1177/10711813261484478
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
Discover connections
Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.