STADA: Specification-based Testing for Autonomous Driving Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Saha, Joy, Woodlief, Trey, Elbaum, Sebastian, Dwyer, Matthew B.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Saha, Joy
Woodlief, Trey
Elbaum, Sebastian
Dwyer, Matthew B.
author_facet Saha, Joy
Woodlief, Trey
Elbaum, Sebastian
Dwyer, Matthew B.
contents Simulation-based testing has become a standard approach to validating autonomous driving agents prior to real-world deployment. A high-quality validation campaign will exercise an agent in diverse contexts comprised of varying static environments, e.g., lanes, intersections, signage, and dynamic elements, e.g., vehicles and pedestrians. To achieve this, existing test generation techniques rely on template-based, manually constructed, or random scenario generation. When applied to validate formally specified safety requirements, such methods either require significant human effort or run the risk of missing important behavior related to the requirement. To address this gap, we present STADA, a Specification-based Test generation framework for Autonomous Driving Agents that systematically generates the space of scenarios defined by a formal specification expressed in temporal logic (LTLf). Given a specification, STADA constructs all distinct initial scenes, a diverse space of continuations of those scenes, and simulations that reflect the behaviors of the specification. Evaluation of STADA on a variety of LTLf specifications formalized in SCENEFLOW using three complementary coverage criteria demonstrates that STADA yields more than 2x higher coverage than the best baseline on the finest criteria and a 75% increase for the coarsest criteria. Moreover, it matches the coverage of the best baseline with 6 times fewer simulations. While set in the context of autonomous driving, the approach is applicable to other domains with rich simulation environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_10940
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STADA: Specification-based Testing for Autonomous Driving Agents
Saha, Joy
Woodlief, Trey
Elbaum, Sebastian
Dwyer, Matthew B.
Software Engineering
Robotics
Simulation-based testing has become a standard approach to validating autonomous driving agents prior to real-world deployment. A high-quality validation campaign will exercise an agent in diverse contexts comprised of varying static environments, e.g., lanes, intersections, signage, and dynamic elements, e.g., vehicles and pedestrians. To achieve this, existing test generation techniques rely on template-based, manually constructed, or random scenario generation. When applied to validate formally specified safety requirements, such methods either require significant human effort or run the risk of missing important behavior related to the requirement. To address this gap, we present STADA, a Specification-based Test generation framework for Autonomous Driving Agents that systematically generates the space of scenarios defined by a formal specification expressed in temporal logic (LTLf). Given a specification, STADA constructs all distinct initial scenes, a diverse space of continuations of those scenes, and simulations that reflect the behaviors of the specification. Evaluation of STADA on a variety of LTLf specifications formalized in SCENEFLOW using three complementary coverage criteria demonstrates that STADA yields more than 2x higher coverage than the best baseline on the finest criteria and a 75% increase for the coarsest criteria. Moreover, it matches the coverage of the best baseline with 6 times fewer simulations. While set in the context of autonomous driving, the approach is applicable to other domains with rich simulation environments.
title STADA: Specification-based Testing for Autonomous Driving Agents
topic Software Engineering
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10940