# Large Language Models for Pedestrian Safety: An Application to Predicting Driver Yielding Behavior at Unsignalized Intersections

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19657/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [MEDEC: A Benchmark for Medical Error Detection and Correction in Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19260/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Travel Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00819/) (2023)
- [Trained Random Forests Completely Reveal your Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19232/) (2024)

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

- [A Vision-and-Knowledge Enhanced Large Language Model for Generalizable Pedestrian Crossing Behavior Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00694/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pedestrian safety is a critical component of urban mobility and is strongly influenced by the interactions between pedestrian decision-making and driver yielding behavior at crosswalks. Modeling driver--pedestrian interactions at intersections requires accurately capturing the complexity of these behaviors. Traditional machine learning models often struggle to capture the nuanced and context-dependent reasoning required for these multifactorial interactions, due to their reliance on fixed feature representations and limited interpretability. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) are suited for extracting patterns from heterogeneous traffic data, enabling accurate modeling of driver-pedestrian interactions. Therefore, this paper leverages multimodal LLMs through a novel prompt design that incorporates domain-specific knowledge, structured reasoning, and few-shot prompting, enabling interpretable and context-aware inference of driver yielding behavior, as an example application of modeling pedestrian--driver interaction. We benchmarked state-of-the-art LLMs against traditional classifiers, finding that GPT-4o consistently achieves the highest accuracy and recall, while Deepseek-V3 excels in precision. These findings highlight the critical trade-offs between model performance and computational efficiency, offering practical guidance for deploying LLMs in real-world pedestrian safety systems.