Zero-shot Hazard Identification in Autonomous Driving: A Case Study on the COOOL Benchmark

This paper presents our submission to the COOOL com-petition, a novel benchmark for detecting and classifying out-of-label hazards in autonomous driving. Our approach integrates diverse methods across three core tasks: (i) driver reaction detection, (ii) hazard object identification, and (iii) hazard captioning. We propose kernel-based change point detection on bounding boxes and optical flow dynamics for driver reaction detection to analyze motion patterns. For hazard identification, we combined a naive proximity-based strategy with object classification using a pre-trained ViT model. At last, for hazard captioning, we used the Molmo vision-language model with tailored prompts to generate precise and context-aware descriptions of rare and low-resolution hazards. The proposed pipeline outperformed the baseline methods by a large margin, re-ducing the relative error by 33%, and scored 2nd on the final leaderboard consisting of 32 teams.