# Comparison-Based Ordinal Learning for Proactive Driving Risk Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11128 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11128/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [MetaDrive: Composing Diverse Driving Scenarios for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12674/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-based Traffic Accident Anticipation with Spatio-Temporal Relational Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00334/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Traffic Accident Detection in First-Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00618/) (2019)
- [Hybrid Action Based Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Objective Compatible Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08096/) (2025)
- [RiskNet: Interaction-Aware Risk Forecasting for Autonomous Driving in Long-Tail Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15541/) (2025)
- [Accident Anticipation via Temporal Occurrence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22260/) (2025)
- [A Unified Probabilistic Approach to Traffic Conflict Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10959/) (2024)
- [Learning collision risk proactively from naturalistic driving data at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13556/) (2025)
- [RiskProp: Collision-Anchored Self-Supervised Risk Propagation for Early Accident Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27165/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Risk Assessment for Autonomous Vehicles from Spatio-Temporal Probabilistic Occupancy Heatmaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16480/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction via Transformer-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20367/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time driving risk assessment provides an essential basis for proactive safety by identifying and quantifying the danger of ongoing road interactions before adverse outcomes occur. However, due to the scarcity of collision data and frame-level risk labels, existing driving risk assessment methods often rely on surrogate objectives, which may imperfectly align with true collision risk and not faithfully reflect the relative danger of driving interaction. This paper proposes a comparison-based ordinal risk learning framework that learns collision-relevant risk scores from pairwise supervision in driving data, directly modeling relative risk ordering without requiring numerical frame-level risk labels. We derive pairwise comparisons from three sources of event-structured driving data for such ordinal risk learning: temporal progression within safety-critical sequences, event-level contrast between dangerous and normal interactions, and physics-based counterfactual perturbations. On this basis, instantiations with three risk-scoring function parameterizations are implemented, including directly learning risk scores from comparison data, and aligning existing single or multiple surrogate-based risk models. The proposed framework is evaluated on the 100-Car and SHRP2 naturalistic driving datasets using a proactive collision warning task. Results show that the proposed framework improves high-recall risk discrimination, warning precision, and warning lead time over representative surrogate-based baselines across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution evaluations. These results suggest that the proposed framework can contribute to proactive safety research by providing more reliable risk assessment for automated driving systems and safety-critical driving interactions.