LATTE: Lightweight Attention-based Traffic Accident Anticipation Engine

Abstract: Accurately predicting traffic accidents in real-time is a critical challenge in autonomous driving, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Existing solutions often suffer from high computational overhead or fail to adequately address the uncertainty of evolving traffic scenarios. This paper introduces LATTE, a Lightweight Attention-based Traffic Accident Anticipation Engine, which integrates computational efficiency with state-of-the-art performance. LATTE employs Efficient Multiscale Spatial Aggregation (EMSA) to capture spatial features across scales, Memory Attention Aggregation (MAA) to enhance temporal modeling, and Auxiliary Self-Attention Aggregation (AAA) to extract latent dependencies over extended sequences. Additionally, LATTE incorporates the Flamingo Alert-Assisted System (FAA), leveraging a vision-LLM to provide real-time, cognitively accessible verbal hazard alerts, improving passenger situational awareness. Evaluations on benchmark datasets (DAD, CCD, A3D) demonstrate LATTE's superior predictive capabilities and computational efficiency. LATTE achieves state-of-the-art 89.74% Average Precision (AP) on DAD benchmark, with 5.4% higher mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA) than the second-best model, and maintains competitive mTTA at a Recall of 80% (TTA@R80) (4.04s) while demonstrating robust accident anticipation across diverse driving conditions. Its lightweight design delivers a 93.14% reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) and a 31.58% decrease in parameter count (Params), enabling real-time operation on resource-limited hardware without compromising performance. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of LATTE's architectural components, while visualizations and failure case analyses highlight its practical applicability and areas for enhancement.