# TrafficVLM: A Controllable Visual Language Model for Traffic Video Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09275 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09275/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 40 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10904/) (2021)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02387/) (2021)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18445/) (2023)
- [Learning Temporal Regularity in Video Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04574/) (2016)
- [Span-based Localizing Network for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13931/) (2020)
- [Unmasked Teacher: Towards Training-Efficient Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16058/) (2023)
- [To Find Where You Talk: Temporal Sentence Localization in Video with Attention Based Location Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07014/) (2018)
- [MAN: Moment Alignment Network for Natural Language Moment Retrieval via Iterative Graph Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00087/) (2018)
- [VideoPrism: A Foundational Visual Encoder for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13217/) (2024)
- [ExCL: Extractive Clip Localization Using Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02755/) (2019)
- [VideoCoCa: Video-Text Modeling with Zero-Shot Transfer from Contrastive Captioners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04979/) (2022)
- [Abnormal Event Detection in Videos using Spatiotemporal Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01546/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13502/) (2025)
- [When language and vision meet road safety: leveraging multimodal large language models for video-based traffic accident analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10604/) (2025)
- [The 8th AI City Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09432/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models and Their Applications in Roadway Safety and Mobility Enhancement: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06301/) (2025)
- [ACCIDENT: A Benchmark Dataset for Vehicle Accident Detection from Traffic Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09819/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Multimodal-LLMs Assisted by Instance Segmentation for Intelligent Traffic Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11304/) (2025)
- [Enhanced Vision-Language Models for Diverse Sensor Understanding: Cost-Efficient Optimization and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20750/) (2024)
- [CoT-VLM4Tar: Chain-of-Thought Guided Vision-Language Models for Traffic Anomaly Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01632/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Crash Detection in Video: A Survey of Methods, Datasets, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02074/) (2025)
- [Task-Specific Dual-Model Framework for Comprehensive Traffic Safety Video Description and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11907/) (2025)
- [Addressing Out-of-Label Hazard Detection in Dashcam Videos: Insights from the COOOL Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16037/) (2025)
- [Towards Safe Mobility: A Unified Transportation Foundation Model enabled by Open-Ended Vision-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22260/) (2026)
- [MCAM: Multimodal Causal Analysis Model for Ego-Vehicle-Level Driving Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06072/) (2025)
- [TrafficLens: Multi-Camera Traffic Video Analysis Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20965/) (2025)
- [TrafficRAG: A Multimodal RAG Framework for Traffic Accident Liability Determination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01737/) (2026)
- [CosmosAlign: Adapting a World Foundation Model for Generative Traffic Video Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07693/) (2026)
- [UniTraffic-Agent: Unified Traffic Video Reasoning for AI City Challenge 2026 Track 3 with Two Out-of-Domain Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13031/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic video description and analysis have received much attention recently due to the growing demand for efficient and reliable urban surveillance systems. Most existing methods only focus on locating traffic event segments, which severely lack descriptive details related to the behaviour and context of all the subjects of interest in the events. In this paper, we present TrafficVLM, a novel multi-modal dense video captioning model for vehicle ego camera view. TrafficVLM models traffic video events at different levels of analysis, both spatially and temporally, and generates long fine-grained descriptions for the vehicle and pedestrian at different phases of the event. We also propose a conditional component for TrafficVLM to control the generation outputs and a multi-task fine-tuning paradigm to enhance TrafficVLM's learning capability. Experiments show that TrafficVLM performs well on both vehicle and overhead camera views. Our solution achieved outstanding results in Track 2 of the AI City Challenge 2024, ranking us third in the challenge standings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/quangminhdinh/TrafficVLM.