Combining Hierarchical Cognitive Process with Process Supervision for Interpretable Scene Safety Understanding

Abstract

Scene safety understanding plays a life-or-death role in situational awareness in various critical domains. Traditional methods that rely on learning direct mappings between scenes and safety levels often lack interpretability, limiting their reliability in critical applications. An effective approach to overcoming this challenge lies in interpreting human cognitive processes and equipping machine models with analogous cognitive capabilities. This work explores an effective way of integrating scene safety cognitive process modeling and process supervision. Specifically, we first construct a hierarchical cognitive safety structure, which motivates the development of a novel, high-quality scene safety understanding dataset based on multi-step reasoning with process labels. This dataset serves both as a benchmark and a resource to improve the safety reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), while also enabling a granular analysis of intermediate reasoning steps through information flow and saliency-based techniques. Building upon this foundation, we introduce a modular and flexible process supervision framework that reflects the hierarchical nature of human cognition. This framework leverages LLMs as the core architecture and incorporates Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) strategies to enable specialization and collaboration among expert modules, each tasked with specific sub-processes of the overall reasoning chain. Systematic experimental evaluations and analyses confirm that our framework exhibits superior interpretability and performance characteristics compared to traditional approaches.