FLaRA: Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation

Anticipating traffic accidents from dashcam videos is a critical challenge in intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods typically map visual context directly to a collision probability without explicitly modeling the future evolution of the driving scene. In this paper we propose FLaRA (Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation), a novel predictive architecture that shifts this paradigm by forecasting future latent representations for accident anticipation. Building upon the Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA2), our model conditions a predictor network on observed context frames to predict the forthcoming latent features of the scene. A classifier then operates on these predicted future representations rather than only on past observations. To ensure these forecasts remain grounded in realistic future dynamics, we introduce a joint training objective that simultaneously optimizes an auxiliary feature-level reconstruction loss and a cross-entropy classification loss. Extensive evaluations on the Nexar dataset, alongside cross-domain validations on the DAD, DADA-2000, and DoTA benchmarks, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining realistic early warning capabilities.

VZCrash: A Large-Scale IMU Dataset of Ego-Vehicle Crashes

We introduce VZCrash, the largest publicly available dataset of real-world vehicle collision data featuring Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) telemetry. The dataset contains more than 31,000 validated crashes and 158,000 negative samples, including hard cases and distractors. Each sample includes acceleration and angular velocity at 100 Hz, and GPS speed at 1 Hz. Events in VZCrash were captured by devices installed on a fleet of 73,010 commercial vehicles of different sizes driving in the United States over the span of several years. We also present an extensive experimental study enabled by the volume of the dataset. We first benchmark several different approaches, from a simple threshold-based heuristic to state-of-the-art deep learning models. Then, we present an experiment demonstrating the importance of scaling data to train high-quality crash detection models, and we show that scale is especially important when these models need to be deployed into a real-world environment.