Driving Video Retrieval for Complex Queries with Structured Grounding

Abstract:Video retrieval at scale is central to data curation and safety validation in autonomous driving, where users want to find not only scenes but also dynamic events such as cut-ins and hard braking. Existing vision-language and keyword-based retrieval methods often miss these events because the relevant motion may not be explicitly described in text or captured by lexical overlap. Rule-based retrieval can encode such events more directly, but it is brittle: generated or hand-written rules often fail when their assumptions do not match real driving data. We propose STRIVE-D, a data-calibrated retrieval framework for driving videos. It uses weakly labeled in-domain videos to estimate when a query rule is reliable, adapt rules that mismatch observed data, and fuse calibrated rule scores with vision-language and keyword-based retrieval signals. Across three driving benchmarks, including newly released human-annotated event data on DrivingDojo, STRIVE-D delivers up to 84% relative improvement in top-1 accuracy over state-of-the-art methods.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2606.09109 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2606.09109v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.09109 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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