NARRATE: A Multimodal Real-World Australian Driving Dataset for Human-Centred Explanations in Automated Driving

Abstract

Automated vehicles must explain their decisions in ways that passengers can understand, monitor, and trust. Existing language-annotated driving datasets are mostly observer-written, post-hoc, simulation-based, or generated from sensor inputs, rather than elicited from the driver performing the action. We introduce NARRATE, a multimodal real-world Australian driving dataset comprising 2,050 annotated events from 35 experienced drivers and driving instructors on public roads. Each event is grounded in synchronised visual, localisation, motion, and LiDAR streams and paired with in-vehicle and/or post-drive free-text explanations. NARRATE provides action labels, scenario-context labels spanning six high-level and 32 fine-grained categories, and span-level Situational Awareness (SA) annotations over driver explanations for Perception, Comprehension and Projection. Four benchmark tasks (SA, scenario-context, driver-action classification, and explanation generation) show that this structure is learnable from driver language, while fine-grained context recognition and explanation generation remain challenging. NARRATE paves a path towards more human-centred and domain-aware explanation models for automated driving.