AgenticConflictLens: From Long Traffic Videos to Verifiable Conflict Evidence

Traffic cameras continuously record urban road-user behavior, providing proactive safety evidence beyond crash reports. Yet safety-critical events - conflicts, near misses, unsafe turns, sudden braking, and crosswalk interactions - are rare and brief, buried in hours of routine footage. Existing traffic-video pipelines extract detections, trajectories, and risk scores but process footage uniformly, without adapting to an analyst's query. Vision-language methods improve scene understanding but often lack traffic-specific verification of participant-level conflicts. We introduce AgenticConflictLens, an agentic, query-conditioned framework for efficient, auditable conflict extraction from long fixed-camera traffic videos. Given a natural-language safety query, a Traffic-Aware Controller combines structured traffic memory with specialized conflict-analysis tools to choose where to search, which road users to examine, and which evidence to verify or reject. A coarse-to-fine search retrieves candidate intervals and applies detailed verification selectively. The framework produces conflict records with refined time intervals, participant pairs, semantic regions, trajectories, motion evidence, uncertainty, rejection reasons, and supporting clips. On 96 annotated hours from Bellevue and NYC DOT, AgenticConflictLens achieves the highest conflict-existence F1 and temporal IoU on both datasets: 0.84 F1/0.77 tIoU on Bellevue and 0.80 F1/0.73 tIoU on NYC DOT, while inspecting only 8.7% and 11.9% of video, respectively. These results support scalable, evidence-grounded urban traffic-safety analysis.