# Investigating Traffic Accident Detection Using Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19096/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 15 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 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, 15 of 15)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [DeepAccident: A Motion and Accident Prediction Benchmark for V2X Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01168/) (2023)
- [Vision-Based Traffic Accident Detection and Anticipation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15985/) (2023)
- [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)
- [AccidentGPT: Large Multi-Modal Foundation Model for Traffic Accident Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03040/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Scene Graphs for Traffic Accident Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05910/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Accident Detection in Traffic Surveillance Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06461/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Survey on Evaluating Quality and Trustworthiness in LLM-Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17717/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic safety remains a critical global concern, with timely and accurate accident detection essential for hazard reduction and rapid emergency response. Infrastructure-based vision sensors offer scalable and efficient solutions for continuous real-time monitoring, facilitating automated detection of accidents directly from captured images. This research investigates the zero-shot capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for detecting and describing traffic accidents using images from infrastructure cameras, thus minimizing reliance on extensive labeled datasets. Main contributions include: (1) Evaluation of MLLMs using the simulated DeepAccident dataset from CARLA, explicitly addressing the scarcity of diverse, realistic, infrastructure-based accident data through controlled simulations; (2) Comparative performance analysis between Gemini 1.5 and 2.0, Gemma 3 and Pixtral models in accident identification and descriptive capabilities without prior fine-tuning; and (3) Integration of advanced visual analytics, specifically YOLO for object detection, Deep SORT for multi-object tracking, and Segment Anything (SAM) for instance segmentation, into enhanced prompts to improve model accuracy and explainability. Key numerical results show Pixtral as the top performer with an F1-score of 0.71 and 83% recall, while Gemini models gained precision with enhanced prompts (e.g., Gemini 1.5 rose to 90%) but suffered notable F1 and recall losses. Gemma 3 offered the most balanced performance with minimal metric fluctuation. These findings demonstrate the substantial potential of integrating MLLMs with advanced visual analytics techniques, enhancing their applicability in real-world automated traffic monitoring systems.