Why Braking? Scenario Extraction and Reasoning Utilizing LLM

Abstract: The growing number of ADAS-equipped vehicles has led to a dramatic increase in driving data, yet most of them capture routine driving behavior. Identifying and understanding safety-critical corner cases within this vast dataset remains a significant challenge. Braking events are particularly indicative of potentially hazardous situations, motivating the central question of our research: Why does a vehicle brake? Existing approaches primarily rely on rule-based heuristics to retrieve target scenarios using predefined condition filters. While effective in simple environments such as highways, these methods lack generalization in complex urban settings. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages LLM for scenario understanding and reasoning. Our method bridges the gap between low-level numerical signals and natural language descriptions, enabling LLM to interpret and classify driving scenarios. We propose a dual-path scenario retrieval that supports both category-based search for known scenarios and embedding-based retrieval for unknown Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios. To facilitate evaluation, we curate scenario annotations on the Argoverse 2 Sensor Dataset. Experimental results show that our method outperforms rule-based baselines and generalizes well to OOD scenarios.