# PEDESTRIANQA: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Models on Pedestrian Intention and Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24562/

## 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 41 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2026.

## 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 41)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
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- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [NuScenes-QA: A Multi-modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14836/) (2023)
- [LingoQA: Visual Question Answering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14115/) (2023)
- [OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Counterfactual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04348/) (2025)
- [DRAMA: Joint Risk Localization and Captioning in Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10767/) (2022)
- [Vision Language Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14414/) (2023)
- [Dolphins: Multimodal Language Model for Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00438/) (2023)
- [Language Prompt for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04379/) (2023)
- [AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07608/) (2025)
- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [Spatiotemporal Relationship Reasoning for Pedestrian Intent Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08945/) (2020)
- [Rank2Tell: A Multimodal Driving Dataset for Joint Importance Ranking and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06597/) (2023)
- [TITAN: Future Forecast using Action Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13886/) (2020)
- [Predicting Pedestrian Crossing Intention with Feature Fusion and Spatio-Temporal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05485/) (2021)
- [Kwai Keye-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01949/) (2025)
- [CLAIR: Evaluating Image Captions with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12971/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pedestrian intention and trajectory prediction are critical for the safe deployment of autonomous driving systems, directly influencing navigation decisions in complex traffic environments. Recent advances in large vision-language models offer a powerful new paradigm for these tasks by combining high-capacity visual understanding with flexible natural language reasoning. In this work, we introduce PedestrianQA, a large-scale video-based dataset that formulates pedestrian intention and trajectory prediction as question-answering tasks augmented with structured rationales. PedestrianQA expresses richly annotated pedestrian sequences, in natural language, enabling VLMs to learn from visual dynamics, contextual cues, and interactions among traffic agents while generating concise explanations of their predictions without needing specialized architectures tailored for each task. Empirical evaluations across PIE, JAAD, TITAN, and IDD-PeD show that finetuning state-of-the-art VLMs on PedestrianQA significantly improves intention classification, trajectory forecasting accuracy, and the quality of explanatory rationales, demonstrating the strong potential of VLMs as a unified and explainable framework for safety-critical pedestrian behavior modeling.