# Interpretable Modeling of Driver Attention Shifts with a Vision-Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05852/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 6 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2025.

## 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, 6 of 6)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [DRAMA: Joint Risk Localization and Captioning in Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10767/) (2022)
- [Predicting Driver Attention in Critical Situations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06406/) (2017)
- [Where, What, Why: Towards Explainable Driver Attention Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23088/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.