SignRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented System for Scalable Zero-Shot Road Sign Recognition

Minghao Zhu; Zhihao Zhang; Anmol Sidhu; Keith Redmill

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arXiv · 2512.12885

SignRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented System for Scalable Zero-Shot Road Sign Recognition

Minghao Zhu·Zhihao Zhang·Anmol Sidhu·Keith Redmill

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Abstract

Automated road sign recognition is a critical task for intelligent transportation systems, but traditional deep learning methods struggle with the sheer number of sign classes and the impracticality of creating exhaustive labeled datasets. This paper introduces a novel zero-shot recognition framework that adapts the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm to address this challenge. Our method first uses a Vision Language Model (VLM) to generate a textual description of a sign from an input image. This description is used to retrieve a small set of the most relevant sign candidates from a vector database of reference designs. Subsequently, a Large Language Model (LLM) reasons over the retrieved candidates to make a final, fine-grained recognition. We validate this approach on a comprehensive set of 303 regulatory signs from the Ohio MUTCD. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, achieving 95.58% accuracy on ideal reference images and 82.45% on challenging real-world road data. This work demonstrates the viability of RAG-based architectures for creating scalable and accurate systems for road sign recognition without task-specific training.

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BibTeX RIS

Minghao Zhu, Zhihao Zhang, Anmol Sidhu, Keith Redmill. 2025-12-14. SignRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented System for Scalable Zero-Shot Road Sign Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12885

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