Cognitive-Causal Multi-Task Learning with Psychological State Conditioning for Assistive Driving Perception

TL;DR

This paper introduces CauPsi, a causal multi-task learning framework for assistive driving that models hierarchical dependencies and internal driver states to improve perception accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cognitive science-grounded causal structure with psychological conditioning, enhancing multi-task learning for driver assistance systems.

Findings

CauPsi achieves 82.71% accuracy on the AIDE dataset.

It surpasses prior methods by 1.0% overall, with significant gains in driver emotion and behavior recognition.

The psychological state signal learns meaningful patterns without explicit annotations.

Abstract

Multi-task learning for advanced driver assistance systems requires modeling the complex interplay between driver internal states and external traffic environments. However, existing methods treat recognition tasks as flat and independent objectives, failing to exploit the cognitive causal structure underlying driving behavior. In this paper, we propose CauPsi, a cognitive science-grounded causal multi-task learning framework that explicitly models the hierarchical dependencies among Traffic Context Recognition (TCR), Vehicle Context Recognition (VCR), Driver Emotion Recognition (DER), and Driver Behavior Recognition (DBR). The proposed framework introduces two key mechanisms. First, a Causal Task Chain propagates upstream task predictions to downstream tasks via learnable prototype embeddings, realizing the cognitive cascade from environmental perception to behavioral regulation in a differentiable manner. Second, Cross-Task Psychological Conditioning (CTPC) estimates a psychological state signal from driver facial expressions and body posture and injects it as a conditioning input to all tasks including environmental recognition, thereby modeling the modulatory effect of driver internal states on cognitive and decision-making processes. Evaluated on the AIDE dataset, CauPsi achieves a mean accuracy of 82.71% with only 5.05M parameters, surpassing prior work by +1.0% overall, with notable improvements on DER (+3.65%) and DBR (+7.53%). Ablation studies validate the independent contribution of each component, and analysis of the psychological state signal confirms that it acquires systematic task-label-dependent patterns in a self-supervised manner without explicit psychological annotations.