Towards Safe Mobility: A Unified Transportation Foundation Model enabled by Open-Ended Vision-Language Dataset

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22260v1
• Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:09:41 GMT
• Title: Towards Safe Mobility: A Unified Transportation Foundation Model enabled by Open-Ended Vision-Language Dataset
• Abstract summary: We introduce a large-scale open-source vision-language dataset for open-ended reasoning in urban traffic environments.<n> LTD contains 11.6K high-quality VQA pairs collected from heterogeneous roadside cameras, spanning diverse road geometries, traffic participants, illumination conditions, and adverse weather.<n>We propose UniVLT, a transportation foundation model trained via curriculum-based knowledge transfer to unify microscopic AD reasoning and macroscopic traffic analysis within a single architecture.
• Score: 34.90914943734208
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Urban transportation systems face growing safety challenges that require scalable intelligence for emerging smart mobility infrastructures. While recent advances in foundation models and large-scale multimodal datasets have strengthened perception and reasoning in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), existing research remains largely centered on microscopic autonomous driving (AD), with limited attention to city-scale traffic analysis. In particular, open-ended safety-oriented visual question answering (VQA) and corresponding foundation models for reasoning over heterogeneous roadside camera observations remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the Land Transportation Dataset (LTD), a large-scale open-source vision-language dataset for open-ended reasoning in urban traffic environments. LTD contains 11.6K high-quality VQA pairs collected from heterogeneous roadside cameras, spanning diverse road geometries, traffic participants, illumination conditions, and adverse weather. The dataset integrates three complementary tasks: fine-grained multi-object grounding, multi-image camera selection, and multi-image risk analysis, requiring joint reasoning over minimally correlated views to infer hazardous objects, contributing factors, and risky road directions. To ensure annotation fidelity, we combine multi-model vision-language generation with cross-validation and human-in-the-loop refinement. Building upon LTD, we further propose UniVLT, a transportation foundation model trained via curriculum-based knowledge transfer to unify microscopic AD reasoning and macroscopic traffic analysis within a single architecture. Extensive experiments on LTD and multiple AD benchmarks demonstrate that UniVLT achieves SOTA performance on open-ended reasoning tasks across diverse domains, while exposing limitations of existing foundation models in complex multi-view traffic scenarios.

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