# Advanced Assistance for Traffic Crash Analysis: An AI-Driven Multi-Agent Approach to Pre-Crash Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10853/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Towards Evaluating and Building Versatile Large Language Models for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12547/) (2024)
- [Single-agent or Multi-agent Systems? Why Not Both?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18286/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Roles of Large Language Models in Reshaping Transportation Systems: A Survey, Framework, and Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21411/) (2025)
- [Towards Explainable Traffic Flow Prediction with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02937/) (2024)
- [Improving LLM Reasoning with Multi-Agent Tree-of-Thought Validator Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11527/) (2024)
- [AccidentGPT: Large Multi-Modal Foundation Model for Traffic Accident Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03040/) (2024)
- [Advancing Object Detection in Transportation with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): A Comprehensive Review and Empirical Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18286/) (2024)
- [Automating Traffic Model Enhancement with AI Research Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16876/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic collision reconstruction traditionally relies on human expertise and can be accurate, but pre-crash reconstruction is more challenging. This study develops a multi-agent AI framework that reconstructs pre-crash scenarios and infers vehicle behaviors from fragmented collision data. We propose a two-phase collaborative framework with reconstruction and reasoning stages. The system processes 277 rear-end lead vehicle deceleration (LVD) crashes from the Crash Investigation Sampling System (CISS, 2017 to 2022), integrating narrative reports, structured tabular variables, and scene diagrams. Phase I generates natural-language crash reconstructions from multimodal inputs. Phase II combines these reconstructions with Event Data Recorder (EDR) signals to (1) identify striking and struck vehicles and (2) isolate the EDR records most relevant to the collision moment, enabling inference of key pre-crash behaviors. For validation, we evaluated all LVD cases and emphasized 39 complex crashes where multiple EDR records per crash created ambiguity due to missing or conflicting data. Ground truth was set by consensus of two independent manual annotators, with a separate language model used only to flag potential conflicts for re-checking. The framework achieved 100% accuracy across 4,155 trials; three reasoning models produced identical outputs, indicating that performance is driven by the structured prompts rather than model choice. Research analysts without reconstruction training achieved 92.31% accuracy on the same 39 complex cases. Ablation tests showed that removing structured reasoning anchors reduced case-level accuracy from 99.7% to 96.5% and increased errors across multiple output dimensions. The system remained robust under incomplete inputs. This zero-shot evaluation, without domain-specific training or fine-tuning, suggests a scalable approach for AI-assisted pre-crash analysis.