FSDAM: Few-Shot Driving Attention Modeling via Vision-Language Coupling
This enables practical deployment of explainable driver attention systems in data-constrained scenarios like autonomous driving.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting driver attention and generating explanations with minimal training data, achieving competitive performance with only about 100 annotated examples instead of thousands typically required.
Understanding where drivers look and why they shift their attention is essential for autonomous systems that read human intent and justify their actions. Most existing models rely on large-scale gaze datasets to learn these patterns; however, such datasets are labor-intensive to collect and time-consuming to curate. We present FSDAM (Few-Shot Driver Attention Modeling), a framework that achieves joint attention prediction and caption generation with approximately 100 annotated examples, two orders of magnitude fewer than existing approaches. Our approach introduces a dual-pathway architecture where separate modules handle spatial prediction and caption generation while maintaining semantic consistency through cross-modal alignment. Despite minimal supervision, FSDAM achieves competitive performance on attention prediction, generates coherent, and context-aware explanations. The model demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization across multiple driving benchmarks. This work shows that effective attention-conditioned generation is achievable with limited supervision, opening new possibilities for practical deployment of explainable driver attention systems in data-constrained scenarios.