GPT-4V Takes the Wheel: Evaluating Promise and Challenges for Pedestrian Behavior Prediction

Existing pedestrian behavior prediction methods rely primarily on deep neural networks that utilize features extracted from video frame sequences. Although these vision-based models have shown promising results, they face limitations in effectively capturing and utilizing the dynamic spatio-temporal interactions between the target pedestrian and its surrounding traffic elements, crucial for accurate reasoning. Additionally, training these models requires manually annotating domain-specific datasets, a process that is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to generalize to new environments and scenarios. The recent emergence of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) offers potential solutions to these limitations due to their superior visual understanding and causal reasoning capabilities, which can be harnessed through semi-supervised training. GPT-4V(ision), the latest iteration of the state-of-the-art Large-Language Model GPTs, now incorporates vision input capabilities. This report provides a comprehensive evaluation of the potential of GPT-4V for pedestrian behavior prediction in autonomous driving using publicly available datasets: JAAD, PIE, and WiDEVIEW. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate GPT-4V(ision)'s promise in zero-shot pedestrian behavior prediction and driving scene understanding ability for autonomous driving. However, it still falls short of the state-of-the-art traditional domain-specific models. Challenges include difficulties in handling small pedestrians and vehicles in motion. These limitations highlight the need for further research and development in this area.