RiskProp: Collision-Anchored Self-Supervised Risk Propagation for Early Accident Anticipation

Accident anticipation aims to recognize anomalous driving cues before a crash while avoiding false alarms during normal driving. Existing approaches typically formulate this task as binary classification, focusing on whether an accident will occur rather than when it will occur. We propose PRE-ACT, a framework that models accident risk as a continuously evolving signal that increases as the crash approaches. By explicitly enforcing temporal ordering and distance-to-accident awareness, our method progressively raises risk while suppressing premature alarms, leading to significant improvements on MM-AU subsets and Nexar. We further introduce a Separation Score to evaluate the global behavior of predicted risk curves beyond local temporal windows. Code and visualizations are available at https://github.com/giddyyupp/PRE-ACT.

Collision anticipation in autonomous driving requires not only accurate early warnings but also interpretable reasoning about what risk factors are being tracked and how risk evolves over time. Existing methods fall short in this regard: feature-driven models are opaque, post-hoc explanations often lack fidelity, and concept-based methods are mostly designed for static recognition rather than dynamic driving scenes. We propose CARA (Concept-Aware Risk Attention), an intrinsically interpretable spatio-temporal framework for collision anticipation. CARA derives domain-grounded risk concepts from accident narratives, aligns them with video frames via vision-language similarity, and organizes them into evolving concept trajectories. These trajectories provide explicit risk evidence that guides spatial attention, temporal attention, and anticipation, allowing semantic concepts to directly influence both where the model attends and how it predicts risk over time. By treating semantic risk factors as dynamic intermediate evidence rather than auxiliary post-hoc explanations, CARA tightly couples interpretability with the predictive process. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that CARA consistently improves anticipation accuracy and warning earliness over strong baselines, while providing sparse and semantically grounded concept evidence.

Traffic accidents are a leading cause of fatalities and injuries across the globe. Therefore, the ability to anticipate hazardous situations in advance is essential. Automated accident anticipation enables timely intervention through driver alerts and collision avoidance maneuvers, forming a key component of advanced driver assistance systems. In autonomous driving, such predictive capabilities support proactive safety behaviors, such as initiating defensive driving and human takeover when required. Using dash-cam video as input offers a cost-effective solution, but it is challenging due to the complexity of real-world driving scenes. Accident anticipation systems need to operate in real-time. However, current methods involve extracting features from each detected object, which is computationally intensive. We propose VAGNet, a deep neural network that learns to predict accidents from dash-cam video using global features of traffic scenes without requiring explicit object-level features. The network consists of transformer and graph modules, and we use the vision foundation model VideoMAE-V2 for global feature extraction. Experiments on four benchmark datasets (DAD, DoTA, DADA, and Nexar) show that our method anticipates accidents with higher average precision while being computationally more efficient compared to existing methods. It also achieves higher mean time-to-accident scores in most cases, while being competitive in others.