PDB-Eval: An Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models for Description and Explanation of Personalized Driving Behavior

Understanding a driver's behavior and intentions is important for potential risk assessment and early accident prevention. Safety and driver assistance systems can be tailored to individual drivers' behavior, significantly enhancing their effectiveness. However, existing datasets are limited in describing and explaining general vehicle movements based on external visual evidence. This paper introduces a benchmark, PDB-Eval, for a detailed understanding of Personalized Driver Behavior, and aligning Large Multimodal Models (MLLMs) with driving comprehension and reasoning. Our benchmark consists of two main components, PDB-X and PDBQA. PDB-X can evaluate MLLMs' understanding of temporal driving scenes. Our dataset is designed to find valid visual evidence from the external view to explain the driver's behavior from the internal view. To align MLLMs' reasoning abilities with driving tasks, we propose PDB-QA as a visual explanation question-answering task for MLLM instruction fine-tuning. As a generic learning task for generative models like MLLMs, PDB-QA can bridge the domain gap without harming MLLMs' generalizability. Our evaluation indicates that fine-tuning MLLMs on fine-grained descriptions and explanations can effectively bridge the gap between MLLMs and the driving domain, which improves zero-shot performance on question-answering tasks by up to 73.2%. We further evaluate the MLLMs fine-tuned on PDB-X in Brain4Cars' intention prediction and AIDE's recognition tasks. We observe up to 12.5% performance improvements on the turn intention prediction task in Brain4Cars, and consistent performance improvements up to 11.0% on all tasks in AIDE.