Paper Detail

EG-ARSA: An Expert-Grounded Open Model for Visual Road Safety Auditing in Low-Resource Settings

Md Thamed Bin Zaman Chowdhury, Moazzem Hossain

arxiv Score 3.8

Published 2026-08-24 · First seen 2026-08-26

General AI

Abstract

Road traffic injuries remain a major challenge in low- and middle-income countries, where proactive road safety auditing is limited by incomplete crash records, shortages of qualified auditors, and the high cost of large-scale field inspections. To address this problem, we propose Expert-Grounded Distillation (EGD), a novel artificial intelligence framework that transfers institutional road safety expertise into a compact vision-language model for scalable visual road safety auditing. The key innovation is a quantified expert-grounding stage in which the teacher vision-language model is calibrated against authoritative field audits. Large-scale annotation is permitted only after the teacher reaches substantial agreement with expert risk assessments (Cohen's kappa = 0.74). The calibrated teacher then generates structured supervision that is distilled into an 8-billion-parameter student vision-language model using Low-Rank Adaptation and a single leakage-free prompt. We also introduce Bangladesh Road Safety Audit (BD-ARSA), the first open, expert-grounded Bangladeshi visual road safety audit dataset containing 21,947 image-audit records with near-national coverage, and Expert-Grounded Road Safety Auditor (EG-ARSA), the first vision-language model developed specifically for this task. Experimental results show that grounded fine-tuning substantially improves ordinal risk assessment over the zero-shot baseline, while blind expert evaluation demonstrates that the compact student outperforms both its 31 billion-parameter teacher and Gemini-2.5-Flash. These findings demonstrate that EGD provides an effective and scalable engineering solution for proactive road safety auditing in resource-constrained environments.

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BibTeX

@article{chowdhury2026eg,
  title = {EG-ARSA: An Expert-Grounded Open Model for Visual Road Safety Auditing in Low-Resource Settings},
  author = {Md Thamed Bin Zaman Chowdhury and Moazzem Hossain},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Road traffic injuries remain a major challenge in low- and middle-income countries, where proactive road safety auditing is limited by incomplete crash records, shortages of qualified auditors, and the high cost of large-scale field inspections. To address this problem, we propose Expert-Grounded Distillation (EGD), a novel artificial intelligence framework that transfers institutional road safety expertise into a compact vision-language model for scalable visual road safety auditing. The key in},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23563},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2608.23563},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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