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Main Authors: Cheng, Hao, Jiang, Yanbo, Yu, Wenhao, Zhou, Rui, Bian, Jiang, Chen, Keyu, Liu, Zhiyuan, Huang, Heye, Zhang, Hailun, Zhang, Fang, Wang, Jianqiang, Zheng, Sifa
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17841
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author Cheng, Hao
Jiang, Yanbo
Yu, Wenhao
Zhou, Rui
Bian, Jiang
Chen, Keyu
Liu, Zhiyuan
Huang, Heye
Zhang, Hailun
Zhang, Fang
Wang, Jianqiang
Zheng, Sifa
author_facet Cheng, Hao
Jiang, Yanbo
Yu, Wenhao
Zhou, Rui
Bian, Jiang
Chen, Keyu
Liu, Zhiyuan
Huang, Heye
Zhang, Hailun
Zhang, Fang
Wang, Jianqiang
Zheng, Sifa
contents Most autonomous driving safety benchmarks use time-to-collision (TTC) to assess risk and guide safe behaviour. However, TTC-based methods treat risk as a one-dimensional closing problem, despite the inherently two-dimensional nature of collision avoidance, and therefore cannot faithfully capture risk or its evolution over time. Here, we report evasive acceleration (EA), a hyperparameter-free and physically interpretable two-dimensional paradigm for risk quantification. By evaluating all possible directions of collision avoidance, EA defines risk as the minimum magnitude of a constant relative acceleration vector required to alter the relative motion and make the interaction collision-free. Using interaction data from five open datasets and more than 600 real crashes, we derive percentile-based warning thresholds and show that EA provides the earliest statistically significant warning across all thresholds. Moreover, EA provides the best discrimination of eventual collision outcomes and improves information retention by 54.2-241.4% over all compared baselines. Adding EA to existing methods yields 17.5-95.5 times more information gain than adding existing methods to EA, indicating that EA captures much of the outcome-relevant information in existing methods while contributing substantial additional nonredundant information. Overall, EA better captures the structure of collision risk and provides a foundation for next-generation autonomous driving systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Driving risk emerges from the required two-dimensional joint evasive acceleration
Cheng, Hao
Jiang, Yanbo
Yu, Wenhao
Zhou, Rui
Bian, Jiang
Chen, Keyu
Liu, Zhiyuan
Huang, Heye
Zhang, Hailun
Zhang, Fang
Wang, Jianqiang
Zheng, Sifa
Robotics
Most autonomous driving safety benchmarks use time-to-collision (TTC) to assess risk and guide safe behaviour. However, TTC-based methods treat risk as a one-dimensional closing problem, despite the inherently two-dimensional nature of collision avoidance, and therefore cannot faithfully capture risk or its evolution over time. Here, we report evasive acceleration (EA), a hyperparameter-free and physically interpretable two-dimensional paradigm for risk quantification. By evaluating all possible directions of collision avoidance, EA defines risk as the minimum magnitude of a constant relative acceleration vector required to alter the relative motion and make the interaction collision-free. Using interaction data from five open datasets and more than 600 real crashes, we derive percentile-based warning thresholds and show that EA provides the earliest statistically significant warning across all thresholds. Moreover, EA provides the best discrimination of eventual collision outcomes and improves information retention by 54.2-241.4% over all compared baselines. Adding EA to existing methods yields 17.5-95.5 times more information gain than adding existing methods to EA, indicating that EA captures much of the outcome-relevant information in existing methods while contributing substantial additional nonredundant information. Overall, EA better captures the structure of collision risk and provides a foundation for next-generation autonomous driving systems.
title Driving risk emerges from the required two-dimensional joint evasive acceleration
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17841