SafeDriveRAG: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving with Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract

In this work, we study how vision-language models (VLMs) can be utilized to enhance the safety for the autonomous driving system, including perception, situational understanding, and path planning. However, existing research has largely overlooked the evaluation of these models in traffic safety-critical driving scenarios. To bridge this gap, we create the benchmark (SafeDrive228K) and propose a new baseline based on VLM with knowledge graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (SafeDriveRAG) for visual question answering (VQA). Specifically, we introduce SafeDrive228K, the first large-scale multimodal question-answering benchmark comprising 228K examples across 18 sub-tasks. This benchmark encompasses a diverse range of traffic safety queries, from traffic accidents and corner cases to common safety knowledge, enabling a thorough assessment of the comprehension and reasoning abilities of the models. Furthermore, we propose a plug-and-play multimodal knowledge graph-based retrieval-augmented generation approach that employs a novel multi-scale subgraph retrieval algorithm for efficient information retrieval. By incorporating traffic safety guidelines collected from the Internet, this framework further enhances the model's capacity to handle safety-critical situations. Finally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on five mainstream VLMs to assess their reliability in safety-sensitive driving tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating RAG significantly improves performance, achieving a +4.73% gain in Traffic Accidents tasks, +8.79% in Corner Cases tasks and +14.57% in Traffic Safety Commonsense across five mainstream VLMs, underscoring the potential of our proposed benchmark and methodology for advancing research in traffic safety. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/Lumos0507/SafeDriveRAG.