Adversarial Generation and Collaborative Evolution of Safety-Critical Scenarios for Autonomous Vehicles

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Jiangfan, Guo, Yongkang, Zhong, Fangzhi, Zhang, Tianyuan, Jing, Zonglei, Liang, Siyuan, Wang, Jiakai, Zhang, Mingchuan, Liu, Aishan, Liu, Xianglong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866916913246896128
author Liu, Jiangfan
Guo, Yongkang
Zhong, Fangzhi
Zhang, Tianyuan
Jing, Zonglei
Liang, Siyuan
Wang, Jiakai
Zhang, Mingchuan
Liu, Aishan
Liu, Xianglong
author_facet Liu, Jiangfan
Guo, Yongkang
Zhong, Fangzhi
Zhang, Tianyuan
Jing, Zonglei
Liang, Siyuan
Wang, Jiakai
Zhang, Mingchuan
Liu, Aishan
Liu, Xianglong
contents The generation of safety-critical scenarios in simulation has become increasingly crucial for safety evaluation in autonomous vehicles prior to road deployment in society. However, current approaches largely rely on predefined threat patterns or rule-based strategies, which limit their ability to expose diverse and unforeseen failure modes. To overcome these, we propose ScenGE, a framework that can generate plentiful safety-critical scenarios by reasoning novel adversarial cases and then amplifying them with complex traffic flows. Given a simple prompt of a benign scene, it first performs Meta-Scenario Generation, where a large language model, grounded in structured driving knowledge, infers an adversarial agent whose behavior poses a threat that is both plausible and deliberately challenging. This meta-scenario is then specified in executable code for precise in-simulator control. Subsequently, Complex Scenario Evolution uses background vehicles to amplify the core threat introduced by Meta-Scenario. It builds an adversarial collaborator graph to identify key agent trajectories for optimization. These perturbations are designed to simultaneously reduce the ego vehicle's maneuvering space and create critical occlusions. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple reinforcement learning based AV models show that ScenGE uncovers more severe collision cases (+31.96%) on average than SoTA baselines. Additionally, our ScenGE can be applied to large model based AV systems and deployed on different simulators; we further observe that adversarial training on our scenarios improves the model robustness. Finally, we validate our framework through real-world vehicle tests and human evaluation, confirming that the generated scenarios are both plausible and critical. We hope our paper can build up a critical step towards building public trust and ensuring their safe deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_14527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Generation and Collaborative Evolution of Safety-Critical Scenarios for Autonomous Vehicles
Liu, Jiangfan
Guo, Yongkang
Zhong, Fangzhi
Zhang, Tianyuan
Jing, Zonglei
Liang, Siyuan
Wang, Jiakai
Zhang, Mingchuan
Liu, Aishan
Liu, Xianglong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The generation of safety-critical scenarios in simulation has become increasingly crucial for safety evaluation in autonomous vehicles prior to road deployment in society. However, current approaches largely rely on predefined threat patterns or rule-based strategies, which limit their ability to expose diverse and unforeseen failure modes. To overcome these, we propose ScenGE, a framework that can generate plentiful safety-critical scenarios by reasoning novel adversarial cases and then amplifying them with complex traffic flows. Given a simple prompt of a benign scene, it first performs Meta-Scenario Generation, where a large language model, grounded in structured driving knowledge, infers an adversarial agent whose behavior poses a threat that is both plausible and deliberately challenging. This meta-scenario is then specified in executable code for precise in-simulator control. Subsequently, Complex Scenario Evolution uses background vehicles to amplify the core threat introduced by Meta-Scenario. It builds an adversarial collaborator graph to identify key agent trajectories for optimization. These perturbations are designed to simultaneously reduce the ego vehicle's maneuvering space and create critical occlusions. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple reinforcement learning based AV models show that ScenGE uncovers more severe collision cases (+31.96%) on average than SoTA baselines. Additionally, our ScenGE can be applied to large model based AV systems and deployed on different simulators; we further observe that adversarial training on our scenarios improves the model robustness. Finally, we validate our framework through real-world vehicle tests and human evaluation, confirming that the generated scenarios are both plausible and critical. We hope our paper can build up a critical step towards building public trust and ensuring their safe deployment.
title Adversarial Generation and Collaborative Evolution of Safety-Critical Scenarios for Autonomous Vehicles
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14527