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SubscribeLong-term Traffic Simulation with Interleaved Autoregressive Motion and Scenario Generation
An ideal traffic simulator replicates the realistic long-term point-to-point trip that a self-driving system experiences during deployment. Prior models and benchmarks focus on closed-loop motion simulation for initial agents in a scene. This is problematic for long-term simulation. Agents enter and exit the scene as the ego vehicle enters new regions. We propose InfGen, a unified next-token prediction model that performs interleaved closed-loop motion simulation and scene generation. InfGen automatically switches between closed-loop motion simulation and scene generation mode. It enables stable long-term rollout simulation. InfGen performs at the state-of-the-art in short-term (9s) traffic simulation, and significantly outperforms all other methods in long-term (30s) simulation. The code and model of InfGen will be released at https://orangesodahub.github.io/InfGen
RIFT: Closed-Loop RL Fine-Tuning for Realistic and Controllable Traffic Simulation
Achieving both realism and controllability in interactive closed-loop traffic simulation remains a key challenge in autonomous driving. Data-driven simulation methods reproduce realistic trajectories but suffer from covariate shift in closed-loop deployment, compounded by simplified dynamics models that further reduce reliability. Conversely, physics-based simulation methods enhance reliable and controllable closed-loop interactions but often lack expert demonstrations, compromising realism. To address these challenges, we introduce a dual-stage AV-centered simulation framework that conducts open-loop imitation learning pre-training in a data-driven simulator to capture trajectory-level realism and multimodality, followed by closed-loop reinforcement learning fine-tuning in a physics-based simulator to enhance controllability and mitigate covariate shift. In the fine-tuning stage, we propose RIFT, a simple yet effective closed-loop RL fine-tuning strategy that preserves the trajectory-level multimodality through a GRPO-style group-relative advantage formulation, while enhancing controllability and training stability by replacing KL regularization with the dual-clip mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFT significantly improves the realism and controllability of generated traffic scenarios, providing a robust platform for evaluating autonomous vehicle performance in diverse and interactive scenarios.
SAFE-SIM: Safety-Critical Closed-Loop Traffic Simulation with Diffusion-Controllable Adversaries
Evaluating the performance of autonomous vehicle planning algorithms necessitates simulating long-tail safety-critical traffic scenarios. However, traditional methods for generating such scenarios often fall short in terms of controllability and realism; they also neglect the dynamics of agent interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce SAFE-SIM, a novel diffusion-based controllable closed-loop safety-critical simulation framework. Our approach yields two distinct advantages: 1) generating realistic long-tail safety-critical scenarios that closely reflect real-world conditions, and 2) providing controllable adversarial behavior for more comprehensive and interactive evaluations. We develop a novel approach to simulate safety-critical scenarios through an adversarial term in the denoising process of diffusion models, which allows an adversarial agent to challenge a planner with plausible maneuvers while all agents in the scene exhibit reactive and realistic behaviors. Furthermore, we propose novel guidance objectives and a partial diffusion process that enables users to control key aspects of the scenarios, such as the collision type and aggressiveness of the adversarial agent, while maintaining the realism of the behavior. We validate our framework empirically using the nuScenes and nuPlan datasets across multiple planners, demonstrating improvements in both realism and controllability. These findings affirm that diffusion models provide a robust and versatile foundation for safety-critical, interactive traffic simulation, extending their utility across the broader autonomous driving landscape. Project website: https://safe-sim.github.io/.
SLEDGE: Synthesizing Simulation Environments for Driving Agents with Generative Models
SLEDGE is the first generative simulator for vehicle motion planning trained on real-world driving logs. Its core component is a learned model that is able to generate agent bounding boxes and lane graphs. The model's outputs serve as an initial state for traffic simulation. The unique properties of the entities to be generated for SLEDGE, such as their connectivity and variable count per scene, render the naive application of most modern generative models to this task non-trivial. Therefore, together with a systematic study of existing lane graph representations, we introduce a novel raster-to-vector autoencoder (RVAE). It encodes agents and the lane graph into distinct channels in a rasterized latent map. This facilitates both lane-conditioned agent generation and combined generation of lanes and agents with a Diffusion Transformer. Using generated entities in SLEDGE enables greater control over the simulation, e.g. upsampling turns or increasing traffic density. Further, SLEDGE can support 500m long routes, a capability not found in existing data-driven simulators like nuPlan. It presents new challenges for planning algorithms, evidenced by failure rates of over 40% for PDM, the winner of the 2023 nuPlan challenge, when tested on hard routes and dense traffic generated by our model. Compared to nuPlan, SLEDGE requires 500times less storage to set up (<4GB), making it a more accessible option and helping with democratizing future research in this field.
CityFlow: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Large Scale City Traffic Scenario
Traffic signal control is an emerging application scenario for reinforcement learning. Besides being as an important problem that affects people's daily life in commuting, traffic signal control poses its unique challenges for reinforcement learning in terms of adapting to dynamic traffic environment and coordinating thousands of agents including vehicles and pedestrians. A key factor in the success of modern reinforcement learning relies on a good simulator to generate a large number of data samples for learning. The most commonly used open-source traffic simulator SUMO is, however, not scalable to large road network and large traffic flow, which hinders the study of reinforcement learning on traffic scenarios. This motivates us to create a new traffic simulator CityFlow with fundamentally optimized data structures and efficient algorithms. CityFlow can support flexible definitions for road network and traffic flow based on synthetic and real-world data. It also provides user-friendly interface for reinforcement learning. Most importantly, CityFlow is more than twenty times faster than SUMO and is capable of supporting city-wide traffic simulation with an interactive render for monitoring. Besides traffic signal control, CityFlow could serve as the base for other transportation studies and can create new possibilities to test machine learning methods in the intelligent transportation domain.
LiSu: A Dataset and Method for LiDAR Surface Normal Estimation
While surface normals are widely used to analyse 3D scene geometry, surface normal estimation from LiDAR point clouds remains severely underexplored. This is caused by the lack of large-scale annotated datasets on the one hand, and lack of methods that can robustly handle the sparse and often noisy LiDAR data in a reasonable time on the other hand. We address these limitations using a traffic simulation engine and present LiSu, the first large-scale, synthetic LiDAR point cloud dataset with ground truth surface normal annotations, eliminating the need for tedious manual labeling. Additionally, we propose a novel method that exploits the spatiotemporal characteristics of autonomous driving data to enhance surface normal estimation accuracy. By incorporating two regularization terms, we enforce spatial consistency among neighboring points and temporal smoothness across consecutive LiDAR frames. These regularizers are particularly effective in self-training settings, where they mitigate the impact of noisy pseudo-labels, enabling robust real-world deployment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on LiSu, achieving state-of-the-art performance in LiDAR surface normal estimation. Moreover, we showcase its full potential in addressing the challenging task of synthetic-to-real domain adaptation, leading to improved neural surface reconstruction on real-world data.
Getting SMARTER for Motion Planning in Autonomous Driving Systems
Motion planning is a fundamental problem in autonomous driving and perhaps the most challenging to comprehensively evaluate because of the associated risks and expenses of real-world deployment. Therefore, simulations play an important role in efficient development of planning algorithms. To be effective, simulations must be accurate and realistic, both in terms of dynamics and behavior modeling, and also highly customizable in order to accommodate a broad spectrum of research frameworks. In this paper, we introduce SMARTS 2.0, the second generation of our motion planning simulator which, in addition to being highly optimized for large-scale simulation, provides many new features, such as realistic map integration, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, traffic and pedestrian simulation, and a broad variety of sensor models. Moreover, we present a novel benchmark suite for evaluating planning algorithms in various highly challenging scenarios, including interactive driving, such as turning at intersections, and adaptive driving, in which the task is to closely follow a lead vehicle without any explicit knowledge of its intention. Each scenario is characterized by a variety of traffic patterns and road structures. We further propose a series of common and task-specific metrics to effectively evaluate the performance of the planning algorithms. At the end, we evaluate common motion planning algorithms using the proposed benchmark and highlight the challenges the proposed scenarios impose. The new SMARTS 2.0 features and the benchmark are publicly available at github.com/huawei-noah/SMARTS.
Multi-Source Urban Traffic Flow Forecasting with Drone and Loop Detector Data
Traffic forecasting is a fundamental task in transportation research, however the scope of current research has mainly focused on a single data modality of loop detectors. Recently, the advances in Artificial Intelligence and drone technologies have made possible novel solutions for efficient, accurate and flexible aerial observations of urban traffic. As a promising traffic monitoring approach, drone-captured data can create an accurate multi-sensor mobility observatory for large-scale urban networks, when combined with existing infrastructure. Therefore, this paper investigates the problem of multi-source traffic speed prediction, simultaneously using drone and loop detector data. A simple yet effective graph-based model HiMSNet is proposed to integrate multiple data modalities and learn spatio-temporal correlations. Detailed analysis shows that predicting accurate segment-level speed is more challenging than the regional speed, especially under high-demand scenarios with heavier congestions and varying traffic dynamics. Utilizing both drone and loop detector data, the prediction accuracy can be improved compared to single-modality cases, when the sensors have lower coverages and are subject to noise. Our simulation study based on vehicle trajectories in a real urban road network has highlighted the added value of integrating drones in traffic forecasting and monitoring.
Language Conditioned Traffic Generation
Simulation forms the backbone of modern self-driving development. Simulators help develop, test, and improve driving systems without putting humans, vehicles, or their environment at risk. However, simulators face a major challenge: They rely on realistic, scalable, yet interesting content. While recent advances in rendering and scene reconstruction make great strides in creating static scene assets, modeling their layout, dynamics, and behaviors remains challenging. In this work, we turn to language as a source of supervision for dynamic traffic scene generation. Our model, LCTGen, combines a large language model with a transformer-based decoder architecture that selects likely map locations from a dataset of maps, and produces an initial traffic distribution, as well as the dynamics of each vehicle. LCTGen outperforms prior work in both unconditional and conditional traffic scene generation in terms of realism and fidelity. Code and video will be available at https://ariostgx.github.io/lctgen.
Beyond Simulation: Benchmarking World Models for Planning and Causality in Autonomous Driving
World models have become increasingly popular in acting as learned traffic simulators. Recent work has explored replacing traditional traffic simulators with world models for policy training. In this work, we explore the robustness of existing metrics to evaluate world models as traffic simulators to see if the same metrics are suitable for evaluating a world model as a pseudo-environment for policy training. Specifically, we analyze the metametric employed by the Waymo Open Sim-Agents Challenge (WOSAC) and compare world model predictions on standard scenarios where the agents are fully or partially controlled by the world model (partial replay). Furthermore, since we are interested in evaluating the ego action-conditioned world model, we extend the standard WOSAC evaluation domain to include agents that are causal to the ego vehicle. Our evaluations reveal a significant number of scenarios where top-ranking models perform well under no perturbation but fail when the ego agent is forced to replay the original trajectory. To address these cases, we propose new metrics to highlight the sensitivity of world models to uncontrollable objects and evaluate the performance of world models as pseudo-environments for policy training and analyze some state-of-the-art world models under these new metrics.
RealGen: Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controllable Traffic Scenarios
Simulation plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to the potential risks associated with real-world testing. Although significant progress has been made in the visual aspects of simulators, generating complex behavior among agents remains a formidable challenge. It is not only imperative to ensure realism in the scenarios generated but also essential to incorporate preferences and conditions to facilitate controllable generation for AV training and evaluation. Traditional methods, mainly relying on memorizing the distribution of training datasets, often fall short in generating unseen scenarios. Inspired by the success of retrieval augmented generation in large language models, we present RealGen, a novel retrieval-based in-context learning framework for traffic scenario generation. RealGen synthesizes new scenarios by combining behaviors from multiple retrieved examples in a gradient-free way, which may originate from templates or tagged scenarios. This in-context learning framework endows versatile generative capabilities, including the ability to edit scenarios, compose various behaviors, and produce critical scenarios. Evaluations show that RealGen offers considerable flexibility and controllability, marking a new direction in the field of controllable traffic scenario generation. Check our project website for more information: https://realgen.github.io.
iPLAN: Intent-Aware Planning in Heterogeneous Traffic via Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Navigating safely and efficiently in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios is challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to their inability to infer the behaviors or intentions of nearby drivers. In this work, we introduce a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm that can predict trajectories and intents in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios. Our approach for intent-aware planning, iPLAN, allows agents to infer nearby drivers' intents solely from their local observations. We model two distinct incentives for agents' strategies: Behavioral Incentive for high-level decision-making based on their driving behavior or personality and Instant Incentive for motion planning for collision avoidance based on the current traffic state. Our approach enables agents to infer their opponents' behavior incentives and integrate this inferred information into their decision-making and motion-planning processes. We perform experiments on two simulation environments, Non-Cooperative Navigation and Heterogeneous Highway. In Heterogeneous Highway, results show that, compared with centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) MARL baselines such as QMIX and MAPPO, our method yields a 4.3% and 38.4% higher episodic reward in mild and chaotic traffic, with 48.1% higher success rate and 80.6% longer survival time in chaotic traffic. We also compare with a decentralized training decentralized execution (DTDE) baseline IPPO and demonstrate a higher episodic reward of 12.7% and 6.3% in mild traffic and chaotic traffic, 25.3% higher success rate, and 13.7% longer survival time.
Reactive and Safe Road User Simulations using Neural Barrier Certificates
Reactive and safe agent modelings are important for nowadays traffic simulator designs and safe planning applications. In this work, we proposed a reactive agent model which can ensure safety without comprising the original purposes, by learning only high-level decisions from expert data and a low-level decentralized controller guided by the jointly learned decentralized barrier certificates. Empirical results show that our learned road user simulation models can achieve a significant improvement in safety comparing to state-of-the-art imitation learning and pure control-based methods, while being similar to human agents by having smaller errors to the expert data. Moreover, our learned reactive agents are shown to generalize better to unseen traffic conditions, and react better to other road users and therefore can help understand challenging planning problems pragmatically.
Traffic Signs Detection and Recognition System using Deep Learning
With the rapid development of technology, automobiles have become an essential asset in our day-to-day lives. One of the more important researches is Traffic Signs Recognition (TSR) systems. This paper describes an approach for efficiently detecting and recognizing traffic signs in real-time, taking into account the various weather, illumination and visibility challenges through the means of transfer learning. We tackle the traffic sign detection problem using the state-of-the-art of multi-object detection systems such as Faster Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (F-RCNN) and Single Shot Multi- Box Detector (SSD) combined with various feature extractors such as MobileNet v1 and Inception v2, and also Tiny-YOLOv2. However, the focus of this paper is going to be F-RCNN Inception v2 and Tiny YOLO v2 as they achieved the best results. The aforementioned models were fine-tuned on the German Traffic Signs Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) dataset. These models were tested on the host PC as well as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and the TASS PreScan simulation. We will discuss the results of all the models in the conclusion section.
CARL: Congestion-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Imitation-based Perturbations in Mixed Traffic Control
Human-driven vehicles (HVs) exhibit complex and diverse behaviors. Accurately modeling such behavior is crucial for validating Robot Vehicles (RVs) in simulation and realizing the potential of mixed traffic control. However, existing approaches like parameterized models and data-driven techniques struggle to capture the full complexity and diversity. To address this, in this work, we introduce CARL, a hybrid technique combining imitation learning for close proximity car-following and probabilistic sampling for larger headways. We also propose two classes of RL-based RVs: a safety RV focused on maximizing safety and an efficiency RV focused on maximizing efficiency. Our experiments show that the safety RV increases Time-to-Collision above the critical 4 second threshold and reduces Deceleration Rate to Avoid a Crash by up to 80%, while the efficiency RV achieves improvements in throughput of up to 49%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of CARL in enhancing both safety and efficiency in mixed traffic.
AirTrafficGen: Configurable Air Traffic Scenario Generation with Large Language Models
The manual design of scenarios for Air Traffic Control (ATC) training is a demanding and time-consuming bottleneck that limits the diversity of simulations available to controllers. To address this, we introduce a novel, end-to-end approach, AirTrafficGen, that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate and control the generation of complex ATC scenarios. Our method uses a purpose-built, graph-based representation to encode sector topology (including airspace geometry, routes, and fixes) into a format LLMs can process. Through rigorous benchmarking, we show that state-of-the-art models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI o3 can generate high-traffic scenarios whilst maintaining operational realism. Our engineered prompting enables fine-grained control over interaction presence, type, and location. Initial findings suggest these models are also capable of iterative refinement, correcting flawed scenarios based on simple textual feedback. This approach provides a scalable alternative to manual scenario design, addressing the need for a greater volume and variety of ATC training and validation simulations. More broadly, this work showcases the potential of LLMs for complex planning in safety-critical domains.
GA-S$^3$: Comprehensive Social Network Simulation with Group Agents
Social network simulation is developed to provide a comprehensive understanding of social networks in the real world, which can be leveraged for a wide range of applications such as group behavior emergence, policy optimization, and business strategy development. However, billions of individuals and their evolving interactions involved in social networks pose challenges in accurately reflecting real-world complexities. In this study, we propose a comprehensive Social Network Simulation System (GA-S3) that leverages newly designed Group Agents to make intelligent decisions regarding various online events. Unlike other intelligent agents that represent an individual entity, our group agents model a collection of individuals exhibiting similar behaviors, facilitating the simulation of large-scale network phenomena with complex interactions at a manageable computational cost. Additionally, we have constructed a social network benchmark from 2024 popular online events that contains fine-grained information on Internet traffic variations. The experiment demonstrates that our approach is capable of achieving accurate and highly realistic prediction results. Code is open at https://github.com/AI4SS/GAS-3.
Interaction Dataset of Autonomous Vehicles with Traffic Lights and Signs
This paper presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs' behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.
DRIFT open dataset: A drone-derived intelligence for traffic analysis in urban environmen
Reliable traffic data are essential for understanding urban mobility and developing effective traffic management strategies. This study introduces the DRone-derived Intelligence For Traffic analysis (DRIFT) dataset, a large-scale urban traffic dataset collected systematically from synchronized drone videos at approximately 250 meters altitude, covering nine interconnected intersections in Daejeon, South Korea. DRIFT provides high-resolution vehicle trajectories that include directional information, processed through video synchronization and orthomap alignment, resulting in a comprehensive dataset of 81,699 vehicle trajectories. Through our DRIFT dataset, researchers can simultaneously analyze traffic at multiple scales - from individual vehicle maneuvers like lane-changes and safety metrics such as time-to-collision to aggregate network flow dynamics across interconnected urban intersections. The DRIFT dataset is structured to enable immediate use without additional preprocessing, complemented by open-source models for object detection and trajectory extraction, as well as associated analytical tools. DRIFT is expected to significantly contribute to academic research and practical applications, such as traffic flow analysis and simulation studies. The dataset and related resources are publicly accessible at https://github.com/AIxMobility/The-DRIFT.
CausalVerse: Benchmarking Causal Representation Learning with Configurable High-Fidelity Simulations
Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims to uncover the data-generating process and identify the underlying causal variables and relations, whose evaluation remains inherently challenging due to the requirement of known ground-truth causal variables and causal structure. Existing evaluations often rely on either simplistic synthetic datasets or downstream performance on real-world tasks, generally suffering a dilemma between realism and evaluative precision. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for CRL using high-fidelity simulated visual data that retains both realistic visual complexity and, more importantly, access to ground-truth causal generating processes. The dataset comprises around 200 thousand images and 3 million video frames across 24 sub-scenes in four domains: static image generation, dynamic physical simulations, robotic manipulations, and traffic situation analysis. These scenarios range from static to dynamic settings, simple to complex structures, and single to multi-agent interactions, offering a comprehensive testbed that hopefully bridges the gap between rigorous evaluation and real-world applicability. In addition, we provide flexible access to the underlying causal structures, allowing users to modify or configure them to align with the required assumptions in CRL, such as available domain labels, temporal dependencies, or intervention histories. Leveraging this benchmark, we evaluated representative CRL methods across diverse paradigms and offered empirical insights to assist practitioners and newcomers in choosing or extending appropriate CRL frameworks to properly address specific types of real problems that can benefit from the CRL perspective. Welcome to visit our: Project page:https://causal-verse.github.io/, Dataset:https://huggingface.co/CausalVerse.
Ctrl-Crash: Controllable Diffusion for Realistic Car Crashes
Video diffusion techniques have advanced significantly in recent years; however, they struggle to generate realistic imagery of car crashes due to the scarcity of accident events in most driving datasets. Improving traffic safety requires realistic and controllable accident simulations. To tackle the problem, we propose Ctrl-Crash, a controllable car crash video generation model that conditions on signals such as bounding boxes, crash types, and an initial image frame. Our approach enables counterfactual scenario generation where minor variations in input can lead to dramatically different crash outcomes. To support fine-grained control at inference time, we leverage classifier-free guidance with independently tunable scales for each conditioning signal. Ctrl-Crash achieves state-of-the-art performance across quantitative video quality metrics (e.g., FVD and JEDi) and qualitative measurements based on a human-evaluation of physical realism and video quality compared to prior diffusion-based methods.
Integrated Decision Making and Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Driving Under Multimodal Uncertainties: A Bayesian Game Approach
Modeling the interaction between traffic agents is a key issue in designing safe and non-conservative maneuvers in autonomous driving. This problem can be challenging when multi-modality and behavioral uncertainties are engaged. Existing methods either fail to plan interactively or consider unimodal behaviors that could lead to catastrophic results. In this paper, we introduce an integrated decision-making and trajectory planning framework based on Bayesian game (i.e., game of incomplete information). Human decisions inherently exhibit discrete characteristics and therefore are modeled as types of players in the game. A general solver based on no-regret learning is introduced to obtain a corresponding Bayesian Coarse Correlated Equilibrium, which captures the interaction between traffic agents in the multimodal context. With the attained equilibrium, decision-making and trajectory planning are performed simultaneously, and the resulting interactive strategy is shown to be optimal over the expectation of rivals' driving intentions. Closed-loop simulations on different traffic scenarios are performed to illustrate the generalizability and the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Connectivity Management in Satellite-Aided Vehicular Networks with Multi-Head Attention-Based State Estimation
Managing connectivity in integrated satellite-terrestrial vehicular networks is critical for 6G, yet is challenged by dynamic conditions and partial observability. This letter introduces the Multi-Agent Actor-Critic with Satellite-Aided Multi-head self-attention (MAAC-SAM), a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that enables vehicles to autonomously manage connectivity across Vehicle-to-Satellite (V2S), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) links. Our key innovation is the integration of a multi-head attention mechanism, which allows for robust state estimation even with fluctuating and limited information sharing among vehicles. The framework further leverages self-imitation learning (SIL) and fingerprinting to improve learning efficiency and real-time decisions. Simulation results, based on realistic SUMO traffic models and 3GPP-compliant configurations, demonstrate that MAAC-SAM outperforms state-of-the-art terrestrial and satellite-assisted baselines by up to 14% in transmission utility and maintains high estimation accuracy across varying vehicle densities and sharing levels.
Detection of Cooperative Black Hole Attack in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connections in a decentralized manner. Security remains a major challenge for these networks due to their features of open medium, dynamically changing topologies, reliance on cooperative algorithms, absence of centralized monitoring points, and lack of clear lines of defense. Protecting the network layer of a MANET from malicious attacks is an important and challenging security issue, since most of the routing protocols for MANETs are vulnerable to various types of attacks. Ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) is a very popular routing algorithm. However, it is vulnerable to the well-known black hole attack, where a malicious node falsely advertises good paths to a destination node during the route discovery process but drops all packets in the data forwarding phase. This attack becomes more severe when a group of malicious nodes cooperate each other. The proposed mechanism does not apply any cryptographic primitives on the routing messages. Instead, it protects the network by detecting and reacting to malicious activities of the nodes. Simulation results show that the scheme has a significantly high detection rate with moderate network traffic overhead and computation overhead in the nodes.
A Mechanism for Detection of Gray Hole Attack in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Protecting the network layer from malicious attacks is an important and challenging security issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, a security mechanism is proposed to defend against a cooperative gray hole attack on the well known AODV routing protocol in MANETs. A gray hole is a node that selectively drops and forwards data packets after it advertises itself as having the shortest path to the destination node in response to a route request message from a source node. The proposed mechanism does not apply any cryptographic primitives on the routing messages. Instead, it protects the network by detecting and reacting to malicious activities of any node. Simulation results show that the scheme has a significantly high detection rate with moderate network traffic overhead.
Self-Dimensioning and Planning of Small Cell Capacity in Multitenant 5G Networks
An important concept in the fifth generation of mobile networks is multitenancy, which allows diverse operators sharing the same wireless infrastructure. To support this feature in conjunction with the challenging performance requirements of future networks, more automated and faster planning of the required radio capacity is needed. Likewise, installing small cells is an effective resource to provide greater performance and capacity to both indoor and outdoor places. This paper proposes a new framework for automated cell planning in multitenant small cell networks. In particular, taking advantage of the available network data, a set of detailed planning specifications over time and space domains are generated in order to meet the contracted capacity by each tenant. Then, the network infrastructure and configuration are updated according to an algorithm that considers different actions such as adding/removing channels and adding or relocating small cells. The simulation results show the effectiveness of various methods to derive the planning specifications depending on the correlation between the tenant's and network's traffic demands.
Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Distributed Vehicle Position Controls for Coverage Expansion in mmWave V2X
In millimeter wave (mmWave) vehicular communications, multi-hop relay disconnection by line-of-sight (LOS) blockage is a critical problem, especially in the early diffusion phase of mmWave-available vehicles, where not all the vehicles have mmWave communication devices. This paper proposes a distributed position control method for autonomous vehicles to make long relays connecting to road side units (RSUs) by avoiding blockages to communicate with each other via LOS paths. Even though vehicles with the proposed method do not use the whole information of the environments and cooperate with each other, they can decide their action (e.g., lane change and overtaking) to form long relays using only information of its surroundings (e.g., surrounding vehicle positions). The decision-making problem is formulated as a Markov decision process so that autonomous vehicles can learn a practical movement strategy of making long relays by a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. This paper designs a learning algorithm based on a sophisticated deep reinforcement learning algorithm, asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C), which enables vehicles to learn a complex movement strategy quickly by its deepneural-network architecture and multi-agent-learning mechanism. Once the strategy is well trained, vehicles can distributedly move to positions where the long relay to the RSU is established. Simulations results confirm that the proposed method can increase the relay length and coverage even if the traffic conditions and penetration ratio of mmWave communication devices in learning and operation phases are different.
ChatDyn: Language-Driven Multi-Actor Dynamics Generation in Street Scenes
Generating realistic and interactive dynamics of traffic participants according to specific instruction is critical for street scene simulation. However, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive method that generates realistic dynamics of different types of participants including vehicles and pedestrians, with different kinds of interactions between them. In this paper, we introduce ChatDyn, the first system capable of generating interactive, controllable and realistic participant dynamics in street scenes based on language instructions. To achieve precise control through complex language, ChatDyn employs a multi-LLM-agent role-playing approach, which utilizes natural language inputs to plan the trajectories and behaviors for different traffic participants. To generate realistic fine-grained dynamics based on the planning, ChatDyn designs two novel executors: the PedExecutor, a unified multi-task executor that generates realistic pedestrian dynamics under different task plannings; and the VehExecutor, a physical transition-based policy that generates physically plausible vehicle dynamics. Extensive experiments show that ChatDyn can generate realistic driving scene dynamics with multiple vehicles and pedestrians, and significantly outperforms previous methods on subtasks. Code and model will be available at https://vfishc.github.io/chatdyn.
DVI: Depth Guided Video Inpainting for Autonomous Driving
To get clear street-view and photo-realistic simulation in autonomous driving, we present an automatic video inpainting algorithm that can remove traffic agents from videos and synthesize missing regions with the guidance of depth/point cloud. By building a dense 3D map from stitched point clouds, frames within a video are geometrically correlated via this common 3D map. In order to fill a target inpainting area in a frame, it is straightforward to transform pixels from other frames into the current one with correct occlusion. Furthermore, we are able to fuse multiple videos through 3D point cloud registration, making it possible to inpaint a target video with multiple source videos. The motivation is to solve the long-time occlusion problem where an occluded area has never been visible in the entire video. To our knowledge, we are the first to fuse multiple videos for video inpainting. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we build a large inpainting dataset in the real urban road environment with synchronized images and Lidar data including many challenge scenes, e.g., long time occlusion. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for all the criteria, especially the RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) has been reduced by about 13%.
IntersectionZoo: Eco-driving for Benchmarking Multi-Agent Contextual Reinforcement Learning
Despite the popularity of multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated and two-player applications, its success in messy real-world applications has been limited. A key challenge lies in its generalizability across problem variations, a common necessity for many real-world problems. Contextual reinforcement learning (CRL) formalizes learning policies that generalize across problem variations. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for multi-agent CRL has hindered progress in the field. Such benchmarks are desired to be based on real-world applications to naturally capture the many open challenges of real-world problems that affect generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose IntersectionZoo, a comprehensive benchmark suite for multi-agent CRL through the real-world application of cooperative eco-driving in urban road networks. The task of cooperative eco-driving is to control a fleet of vehicles to reduce fleet-level vehicular emissions. By grounding IntersectionZoo in a real-world application, we naturally capture real-world problem characteristics, such as partial observability and multiple competing objectives. IntersectionZoo is built on data-informed simulations of 16,334 signalized intersections derived from 10 major US cities, modeled in an open-source industry-grade microscopic traffic simulator. By modeling factors affecting vehicular exhaust emissions (e.g., temperature, road conditions, travel demand), IntersectionZoo provides one million data-driven traffic scenarios. Using these traffic scenarios, we benchmark popular multi-agent RL and human-like driving algorithms and demonstrate that the popular multi-agent RL algorithms struggle to generalize in CRL settings.
Adaptive Field Effect Planner for Safe Interactive Autonomous Driving on Curved Roads
Autonomous driving has garnered significant attention for its potential to improve safety, traffic efficiency, and user convenience. However, the dynamic and complex nature of interactive driving poses significant challenges, including the need to navigate non-linear road geometries, handle dynamic obstacles, and meet stringent safety and comfort requirements. Traditional approaches, such as artificial potential fields (APF), often fall short in addressing these complexities independently, necessitating the development of integrated and adaptive frameworks. This paper presents a novel approach to autonomous vehicle navigation that integrates artificial potential fields, Frenet coordinates, and improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO). A dynamic risk field, adapted from traditional APF, is proposed to ensure interactive safety by quantifying risks and dynamically adjusting lane-changing intentions based on surrounding vehicle behavior. Frenet coordinates are utilized to simplify trajectory planning on non-straight roads, while an enhanced quintic polynomial trajectory generator ensures smooth and comfortable path transitions. Additionally, an IPSO algorithm optimizes trajectory selection in real time, balancing safety and user comfort within a feasible input range. The proposed framework is validated through extensive simulations and real-world scenarios, demonstrating its ability to navigate complex traffic environments, maintain safety margins, and generate smooth, dynamically feasible trajectories.
A Multi-Layer Blockchain Simulator and Performance Evaluation of Social Internet of Vehicles with Multi-Connectivity Management
The evolution of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication brings significant challenges, such as data integrity and vulnerabilities stemming from centralized management. This paper presents an innovative integration of decentralized blockchain technology with V2X communication through a multi-layered architecture that combines the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) traffic simulator and the BlockSim blockchain simulator. In addition, as the Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) emerges, efficient resource management becomes indispensable for ensuring seamless communication. We also propose a reference multi-connectivity management method named Enhanced MAX-SINR, designed to advance research in blockchain-specific approaches, taking into account retransmission successfull rates. We evaluate blockchain performance in diverse environments such as urban, suburban, and rural areas, demonstrating that enhancing the success rate of retransmitted blockchain-related messages significantly boosts blockchain transaction performance and provides a foundation for developing intelligent SIoV systems.
Improving Agent Behaviors with RL Fine-tuning for Autonomous Driving
A major challenge in autonomous vehicle research is modeling agent behaviors, which has critical applications including constructing realistic and reliable simulations for off-board evaluation and forecasting traffic agents motion for onboard planning. While supervised learning has shown success in modeling agents across various domains, these models can suffer from distribution shift when deployed at test-time. In this work, we improve the reliability of agent behaviors by closed-loop fine-tuning of behavior models with reinforcement learning. Our method demonstrates improved overall performance, as well as improved targeted metrics such as collision rate, on the Waymo Open Sim Agents challenge. Additionally, we present a novel policy evaluation benchmark to directly assess the ability of simulated agents to measure the quality of autonomous vehicle planners and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on this new benchmark.
A Digital Twin Framework for Physical-Virtual Integration in V2X-Enabled Connected Vehicle Corridors
Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS) enhance safety and mobility by integrating cyber and physical transportation systems. A key component of T-CPS is the Digital Twin (DT), a virtual representation that enables simulation, analysis, and optimization through real-time data exchange and communication. Although existing studies have explored DTs for vehicles, communications, pedestrians, and traffic, real-world validations and implementations of DTs that encompass infrastructure, vehicles, signals, communications, and more remain limited due to several challenges. These include accessing real-world connected infrastructure, integrating heterogeneous, multi-sourced data, ensuring real-time data processing, and synchronizing the digital and physical systems. To address these challenges, this study develops a traffic DT based on a real-world connected vehicle corridor. Leveraging the Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) infrastructure in the corridor, along with communication, computing, and simulation technologies, the proposed DT accurately replicates physical vehicle behaviors, signal timing, communications, and traffic patterns within the virtual environment. Building upon the previous data pipeline, the digital system ensures robust synchronization with the physical environment. Moreover, the DT's scalable and redundant architecture enhances data integrity, making it capable of supporting future large-scale C-V2X deployments. Furthermore, its ability to provide feedback to the physical system is demonstrated through applications such as signal timing adjustments, vehicle advisory messages, and incident notifications. The proposed DT is a vital tool in T-CPS, enabling real-time traffic monitoring, prediction, and optimization to enhance the reliability and safety of transportation systems.
KING: Generating Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios for Robust Imitation via Kinematics Gradients
Simulators offer the possibility of safe, low-cost development of self-driving systems. However, current driving simulators exhibit na\"ive behavior models for background traffic. Hand-tuned scenarios are typically added during simulation to induce safety-critical situations. An alternative approach is to adversarially perturb the background traffic trajectories. In this paper, we study this approach to safety-critical driving scenario generation using the CARLA simulator. We use a kinematic bicycle model as a proxy to the simulator's true dynamics and observe that gradients through this proxy model are sufficient for optimizing the background traffic trajectories. Based on this finding, we propose KING, which generates safety-critical driving scenarios with a 20% higher success rate than black-box optimization. By solving the scenarios generated by KING using a privileged rule-based expert algorithm, we obtain training data for an imitation learning policy. After fine-tuning on this new data, we show that the policy becomes better at avoiding collisions. Importantly, our generated data leads to reduced collisions on both held-out scenarios generated via KING as well as traditional hand-crafted scenarios, demonstrating improved robustness.
From Model-Based to Data-Driven Simulation: Challenges and Trends in Autonomous Driving
Simulation is an integral part in the process of developing autonomous vehicles and advantageous for training, validation, and verification of driving functions. Even though simulations come with a series of benefits compared to real-world experiments, various challenges still prevent virtual testing from entirely replacing physical test-drives. Our work provides an overview of these challenges with regard to different aspects and types of simulation and subsumes current trends to overcome them. We cover aspects around perception-, behavior- and content-realism as well as general hurdles in the domain of simulation. Among others, we observe a trend of data-driven, generative approaches and high-fidelity data synthesis to increasingly replace model-based simulation.
Building reliable sim driving agents by scaling self-play
Simulation agents are essential for designing and testing systems that interact with humans, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). These agents serve various purposes, from benchmarking AV performance to stress-testing the system's limits, but all use cases share a key requirement: reliability. A simulation agent should behave as intended by the designer, minimizing unintended actions like collisions that can compromise the signal-to-noise ratio of analyses. As a foundation for reliable sim agents, we propose scaling self-play to thousands of scenarios on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset under semi-realistic limits on human perception and control. Training from scratch on a single GPU, our agents nearly solve the full training set within a day. They generalize effectively to unseen test scenes, achieving a 99.8% goal completion rate with less than 0.8% combined collision and off-road incidents across 10,000 held-out scenarios. Beyond in-distribution generalization, our agents show partial robustness to out-of-distribution scenes and can be fine-tuned in minutes to reach near-perfect performance in those cases. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at this link. We open-source both the pre-trained agents and the complete code base. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/reliable-sim-agents.
Traffic Scene Generation from Natural Language Description for Autonomous Vehicles with Large Language Model
Text-to-scene generation typically limits environmental diversity by generating key scenarios along predetermined paths. To address these constraints, we propose a novel text-to-traffic scene framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) to autonomously generate diverse traffic scenarios for the CARLA simulator based on natural language descriptions. Our pipeline comprises several key stages: (1) Prompt Analysis, where natural language inputs are decomposed; (2) Road Retrieval, selecting optimal roads from a database; (3) Agent Planning, detailing agent types and behaviors; (4) Road Ranking, scoring roads to match scenario requirements; and (5) Scene Generation, rendering the planned scenarios in the simulator. This framework supports both routine and critical traffic scenarios, enhancing its applicability. We demonstrate that our approach not only diversifies agent planning and road selection but also significantly reduces the average collision rate from 8% to 3.5% in SafeBench. Additionally, our framework improves narration and reasoning for driving captioning tasks. Our contributions and resources are publicly available at https://basiclab.github.io/TTSG.
Challenger: Affordable Adversarial Driving Video Generation
Generating photorealistic driving videos has seen significant progress recently, but current methods largely focus on ordinary, non-adversarial scenarios. Meanwhile, efforts to generate adversarial driving scenarios often operate on abstract trajectory or BEV representations, falling short of delivering realistic sensor data that can truly stress-test autonomous driving (AD) systems. In this work, we introduce Challenger, a framework that produces physically plausible yet photorealistic adversarial driving videos. Generating such videos poses a fundamental challenge: it requires jointly optimizing over the space of traffic interactions and high-fidelity sensor observations. Challenger makes this affordable through two techniques: (1) a physics-aware multi-round trajectory refinement process that narrows down candidate adversarial maneuvers, and (2) a tailored trajectory scoring function that encourages realistic yet adversarial behavior while maintaining compatibility with downstream video synthesis. As tested on the nuScenes dataset, Challenger generates a diverse range of aggressive driving scenarios-including cut-ins, sudden lane changes, tailgating, and blind spot intrusions-and renders them into multiview photorealistic videos. Extensive evaluations show that these scenarios significantly increase the collision rate of state-of-the-art end-to-end AD models (UniAD, VAD, SparseDrive, and DiffusionDrive), and importantly, adversarial behaviors discovered for one model often transfer to others.
Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Research
Simulation is an essential tool to develop and benchmark autonomous vehicle planning software in a safe and cost-effective manner. However, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of nuanced and complex multi-agent interactive behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce Waymax, a new data-driven simulator for autonomous driving in multi-agent scenes, designed for large-scale simulation and testing. Waymax uses publicly-released, real-world driving data (e.g., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset) to initialize or play back a diverse set of multi-agent simulated scenarios. It runs entirely on hardware accelerators such as TPUs/GPUs and supports in-graph simulation for training, making it suitable for modern large-scale, distributed machine learning workflows. To support online training and evaluation, Waymax includes several learned and hard-coded behavior models that allow for realistic interaction within simulation. To supplement Waymax, we benchmark a suite of popular imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms with ablation studies on different design decisions, where we highlight the effectiveness of routes as guidance for planning agents and the ability of RL to overfit against simulated agents.
Trajeglish: Learning the Language of Driving Scenarios
A longstanding challenge for self-driving development is simulating dynamic driving scenarios seeded from recorded driving logs. In pursuit of this functionality, we apply tools from discrete sequence modeling to model how vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists interact in driving scenarios. Using a simple data-driven tokenization scheme, we discretize trajectories to centimeter-level resolution using a small vocabulary. We then model the multi-agent sequence of motion tokens with a GPT-like encoder-decoder that is autoregressive in time and takes into account intra-timestep interaction between agents. Scenarios sampled from our model exhibit state-of-the-art realism; our model tops the Waymo Sim Agents Benchmark, surpassing prior work along the realism meta metric by 3.3% and along the interaction metric by 9.9%. We ablate our modeling choices in full autonomy and partial autonomy settings, and show that the representations learned by our model can quickly be adapted to improve performance on nuScenes. We additionally evaluate the scalability of our model with respect to parameter count and dataset size, and use density estimates from our model to quantify the saliency of context length and intra-timestep interaction for the traffic modeling task.
The Matrix: Infinite-Horizon World Generation with Real-Time Moving Control
We present The Matrix, the first foundational realistic world simulator capable of generating continuous 720p high-fidelity real-scene video streams with real-time, responsive control in both first- and third-person perspectives, enabling immersive exploration of richly dynamic environments. Trained on limited supervised data from AAA games like Forza Horizon 5 and Cyberpunk 2077, complemented by large-scale unsupervised footage from real-world settings like Tokyo streets, The Matrix allows users to traverse diverse terrains -- deserts, grasslands, water bodies, and urban landscapes -- in continuous, uncut hour-long sequences. Operating at 16 FPS, the system supports real-time interactivity and demonstrates zero-shot generalization, translating virtual game environments to real-world contexts where collecting continuous movement data is often infeasible. For example, The Matrix can simulate a BMW X3 driving through an office setting--an environment present in neither gaming data nor real-world sources. This approach showcases the potential of AAA game data to advance robust world models, bridging the gap between simulations and real-world applications in scenarios with limited data.
NeuroNCAP: Photorealistic Closed-loop Safety Testing for Autonomous Driving
We present a versatile NeRF-based simulator for testing autonomous driving (AD) software systems, designed with a focus on sensor-realistic closed-loop evaluation and the creation of safety-critical scenarios. The simulator learns from sequences of real-world driving sensor data and enables reconfigurations and renderings of new, unseen scenarios. In this work, we use our simulator to test the responses of AD models to safety-critical scenarios inspired by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). Our evaluation reveals that, while state-of-the-art end-to-end planners excel in nominal driving scenarios in an open-loop setting, they exhibit critical flaws when navigating our safety-critical scenarios in a closed-loop setting. This highlights the need for advancements in the safety and real-world usability of end-to-end planners. By publicly releasing our simulator and scenarios as an easy-to-run evaluation suite, we invite the research community to explore, refine, and validate their AD models in controlled, yet highly configurable and challenging sensor-realistic environments. Code and instructions can be found at https://github.com/atonderski/neuro-ncap
NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking
Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.
CityDreamer4D: Compositional Generative Model of Unbounded 4D Cities
3D scene generation has garnered growing attention in recent years and has made significant progress. Generating 4D cities is more challenging than 3D scenes due to the presence of structurally complex, visually diverse objects like buildings and vehicles, and heightened human sensitivity to distortions in urban environments. To tackle these issues, we propose CityDreamer4D, a compositional generative model specifically tailored for generating unbounded 4D cities. Our main insights are 1) 4D city generation should separate dynamic objects (e.g., vehicles) from static scenes (e.g., buildings and roads), and 2) all objects in the 4D scene should be composed of different types of neural fields for buildings, vehicles, and background stuff. Specifically, we propose Traffic Scenario Generator and Unbounded Layout Generator to produce dynamic traffic scenarios and static city layouts using a highly compact BEV representation. Objects in 4D cities are generated by combining stuff-oriented and instance-oriented neural fields for background stuff, buildings, and vehicles. To suit the distinct characteristics of background stuff and instances, the neural fields employ customized generative hash grids and periodic positional embeddings as scene parameterizations. Furthermore, we offer a comprehensive suite of datasets for city generation, including OSM, GoogleEarth, and CityTopia. The OSM dataset provides a variety of real-world city layouts, while the Google Earth and CityTopia datasets deliver large-scale, high-quality city imagery complete with 3D instance annotations. Leveraging its compositional design, CityDreamer4D supports a range of downstream applications, such as instance editing, city stylization, and urban simulation, while delivering state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic 4D cities.
Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysis
For autonomous vehicles, safe navigation in complex environments depends on handling a broad range of diverse and rare driving scenarios. Simulation- and scenario-based testing have emerged as key approaches to development and validation of autonomous driving systems. Traditional scenario generation relies on rule-based systems, knowledge-driven models, and data-driven synthesis, often producing limited diversity and unrealistic safety-critical cases. With the emergence of foundation models, which represent a new generation of pre-trained, general-purpose AI models, developers can process heterogeneous inputs (e.g., natural language, sensor data, HD maps, and control actions), enabling the synthesis and interpretation of complex driving scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a survey about the application of foundation models for scenario generation and scenario analysis in autonomous driving (as of May 2025). Our survey presents a unified taxonomy that includes large language models, vision-language models, multimodal large language models, diffusion models, and world models for the generation and analysis of autonomous driving scenarios. In addition, we review the methodologies, open-source datasets, simulation platforms, and benchmark challenges, and we examine the evaluation metrics tailored explicitly to scenario generation and analysis. Finally, the survey concludes by highlighting the open challenges and research questions, and outlining promising future research directions. All reviewed papers are listed in a continuously maintained repository, which contains supplementary materials and is available at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/FM-for-Scenario-Generation-Analysis.
Diverse Controllable Diffusion Policy with Signal Temporal Logic
Generating realistic simulations is critical for autonomous system applications such as self-driving and human-robot interactions. However, driving simulators nowadays still have difficulty in generating controllable, diverse, and rule-compliant behaviors for road participants: Rule-based models cannot produce diverse behaviors and require careful tuning, whereas learning-based methods imitate the policy from data but are not designed to follow the rules explicitly. Besides, the real-world datasets are by nature "single-outcome", making the learning method hard to generate diverse behaviors. In this paper, we leverage Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and Diffusion Models to learn controllable, diverse, and rule-aware policy. We first calibrate the STL on the real-world data, then generate diverse synthetic data using trajectory optimization, and finally learn the rectified diffusion policy on the augmented dataset. We test on the NuScenes dataset and our approach can achieve the most diverse rule-compliant trajectories compared to other baselines, with a runtime 1/17X to the second-best approach. In the closed-loop testing, our approach reaches the highest diversity, rule satisfaction rate, and the least collision rate. Our method can generate varied characteristics conditional on different STL parameters in testing. A case study on human-robot encounter scenarios shows our approach can generate diverse and closed-to-oracle trajectories. The annotation tool, augmented dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/mengyuest/pSTL-diffusion-policy.
Characterized Diffusion Networks for Enhanced Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction
In this paper, we present a novel trajectory prediction model for autonomous driving, combining a Characterized Diffusion Module and a Spatial-Temporal Interaction Network to address the challenges posed by dynamic and heterogeneous traffic environments. Our model enhances the accuracy and reliability of trajectory predictions by incorporating uncertainty estimation and complex agent interactions. Through extensive experimentation on public datasets such as NGSIM, HighD, and MoCAD, our model significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate its ability to capture the underlying spatial-temporal dynamics of traffic scenarios and improve prediction precision, especially in complex environments. The proposed model showcases strong potential for application in real-world autonomous driving systems.
ReSim: Reliable World Simulation for Autonomous Driving
How can we reliably simulate future driving scenarios under a wide range of ego driving behaviors? Recent driving world models, developed exclusively on real-world driving data composed mainly of safe expert trajectories, struggle to follow hazardous or non-expert behaviors, which are rare in such data. This limitation restricts their applicability to tasks such as policy evaluation. In this work, we address this challenge by enriching real-world human demonstrations with diverse non-expert data collected from a driving simulator (e.g., CARLA), and building a controllable world model trained on this heterogeneous corpus. Starting with a video generator featuring a diffusion transformer architecture, we devise several strategies to effectively integrate conditioning signals and improve prediction controllability and fidelity. The resulting model, ReSim, enables Reliable Simulation of diverse open-world driving scenarios under various actions, including hazardous non-expert ones. To close the gap between high-fidelity simulation and applications that require reward signals to judge different actions, we introduce a Video2Reward module that estimates a reward from ReSim's simulated future. Our ReSim paradigm achieves up to 44% higher visual fidelity, improves controllability for both expert and non-expert actions by over 50%, and boosts planning and policy selection performance on NAVSIM by 2% and 25%, respectively.
MARS: An Instance-aware, Modular and Realistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving
Nowadays, autonomous cars can drive smoothly in ordinary cases, and it is widely recognized that realistic sensor simulation will play a critical role in solving remaining corner cases by simulating them. To this end, we propose an autonomous driving simulator based upon neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Compared with existing works, ours has three notable features: (1) Instance-aware. Our simulator models the foreground instances and background environments separately with independent networks so that the static (e.g., size and appearance) and dynamic (e.g., trajectory) properties of instances can be controlled separately. (2) Modular. Our simulator allows flexible switching between different modern NeRF-related backbones, sampling strategies, input modalities, etc. We expect this modular design to boost academic progress and industrial deployment of NeRF-based autonomous driving simulation. (3) Realistic. Our simulator set new state-of-the-art photo-realism results given the best module selection. Our simulator will be open-sourced while most of our counterparts are not. Project page: https://open-air-sun.github.io/mars/.
Reliving the Dataset: Combining the Visualization of Road Users' Interactions with Scenario Reconstruction in Virtual Reality
One core challenge in the development of automated vehicles is their capability to deal with a multitude of complex trafficscenarios with many, hard to predict traffic participants. As part of the iterative development process, it is necessary to detect criticalscenarios and generate knowledge from them to improve the highly automated driving (HAD) function. In order to tackle this challenge,numerous datasets have been released in the past years, which act as the basis for the development and testing of such algorithms.Nevertheless, the remaining challenges are to find relevant scenes, such as safety-critical corner cases, in these datasets and tounderstand them completely.Therefore, this paper presents a methodology to process and analyze naturalistic motion datasets in two ways: On the one hand, ourapproach maps scenes of the datasets to a generic semantic scene graph which allows for a high-level and objective analysis. Here,arbitrary criticality measures, e.g. TTC, RSS or SFF, can be set to automatically detect critical scenarios between traffic participants.On the other hand, the scenarios are recreated in a realistic virtual reality (VR) environment, which allows for a subjective close-upanalysis from multiple, interactive perspectives.
COOPERNAUT: End-to-End Driving with Cooperative Perception for Networked Vehicles
Optical sensors and learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles have dramatically advanced in the past few years. Nonetheless, the reliability of today's autonomous vehicles is hindered by the limited line-of-sight sensing capability and the brittleness of data-driven methods in handling extreme situations. With recent developments of telecommunication technologies, cooperative perception with vehicle-to-vehicle communications has become a promising paradigm to enhance autonomous driving in dangerous or emergency situations. We introduce COOPERNAUT, an end-to-end learning model that uses cross-vehicle perception for vision-based cooperative driving. Our model encodes LiDAR information into compact point-based representations that can be transmitted as messages between vehicles via realistic wireless channels. To evaluate our model, we develop AutoCastSim, a network-augmented driving simulation framework with example accident-prone scenarios. Our experiments on AutoCastSim suggest that our cooperative perception driving models lead to a 40% improvement in average success rate over egocentric driving models in these challenging driving situations and a 5 times smaller bandwidth requirement than prior work V2VNet. COOPERNAUT and AUTOCASTSIM are available at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/Coopernaut/.
Traffic-R1: Reinforced LLMs Bring Human-Like Reasoning to Traffic Signal Control Systems
Traffic signal control (TSC) is vital for mitigating congestion and sustaining urban mobility. In this paper, we introduce Traffic-R1, a foundation model with human-like reasoning for TSC systems. Our model is developed through self-exploration and iteration of reinforced large language models (LLMs) with expert guidance in a simulated traffic environment. Compared to traditional reinforcement learning (RL) and recent LLM-based methods, Traffic-R1 offers three significant advantages. First, Traffic-R1 delivers zero-shot generalisation, transferring unchanged to new road networks and out-of-distribution incidents by utilizing its internal traffic control policies and human-like reasoning. Second, its 3B-parameter architecture is lightweight enough for real-time inference on mobile-class chips, enabling large-scale edge deployment. Third, Traffic-R1 provides an explainable TSC process and facilitates multi-intersection communication through its self-iteration and a new synchronous communication network. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that Traffic-R1 sets a new state of the art, outperforming strong baselines and training-intensive RL controllers. In practice, the model now manages signals for more than 55,000 drivers daily, shortening average queues by over 5% and halving operator workload. Our checkpoint is available at https://huggingface.co/Season998/Traffic-R1.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for the Joint Control of Traffic Light Signaling and Vehicle Speed Advice
Traffic congestion in dense urban centers presents an economical and environmental burden. In recent years, the availability of vehicle-to-anything communication allows for the transmission of detailed vehicle states to the infrastructure that can be used for intelligent traffic light control. The other way around, the infrastructure can provide vehicles with advice on driving behavior, such as appropriate velocities, which can improve the efficacy of the traffic system. Several research works applied deep reinforcement learning to either traffic light control or vehicle speed advice. In this work, we propose a first attempt to jointly learn the control of both. We show this to improve the efficacy of traffic systems. In our experiments, the joint control approach reduces average vehicle trip delays, w.r.t. controlling only traffic lights, in eight out of eleven benchmark scenarios. Analyzing the qualitative behavior of the vehicle speed advice policy, we observe that this is achieved by smoothing out the velocity profile of vehicles nearby a traffic light. Learning joint control of traffic signaling and speed advice in the real world could help to reduce congestion and mitigate the economical and environmental repercussions of today's traffic systems.
GeoDrive: 3D Geometry-Informed Driving World Model with Precise Action Control
Recent advancements in world models have revolutionized dynamic environment simulation, allowing systems to foresee future states and assess potential actions. In autonomous driving, these capabilities help vehicles anticipate the behavior of other road users, perform risk-aware planning, accelerate training in simulation, and adapt to novel scenarios, thereby enhancing safety and reliability. Current approaches exhibit deficiencies in maintaining robust 3D geometric consistency or accumulating artifacts during occlusion handling, both critical for reliable safety assessment in autonomous navigation tasks. To address this, we introduce GeoDrive, which explicitly integrates robust 3D geometry conditions into driving world models to enhance spatial understanding and action controllability. Specifically, we first extract a 3D representation from the input frame and then obtain its 2D rendering based on the user-specified ego-car trajectory. To enable dynamic modeling, we propose a dynamic editing module during training to enhance the renderings by editing the positions of the vehicles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing models in both action accuracy and 3D spatial awareness, leading to more realistic, adaptable, and reliable scene modeling for safer autonomous driving. Additionally, our model can generalize to novel trajectories and offers interactive scene editing capabilities, such as object editing and object trajectory control.
Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving
Existing evaluation paradigms for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) face critical limitations. Real-world evaluation is often challenging due to safety concerns and a lack of reproducibility, whereas closed-loop simulation can face insufficient realism or high computational costs. Open-loop evaluation, while being efficient and data-driven, relies on metrics that generally overlook compounding errors. In this paper, we propose pseudo-simulation, a novel paradigm that addresses these limitations. Pseudo-simulation operates on real datasets, similar to open-loop evaluation, but augments them with synthetic observations generated prior to evaluation using 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our key idea is to approximate potential future states the AV might encounter by generating a diverse set of observations that vary in position, heading, and speed. Our method then assigns a higher importance to synthetic observations that best match the AV's likely behavior using a novel proximity-based weighting scheme. This enables evaluating error recovery and the mitigation of causal confusion, as in closed-loop benchmarks, without requiring sequential interactive simulation. We show that pseudo-simulation is better correlated with closed-loop simulations (R^2=0.8) than the best existing open-loop approach (R^2=0.7). We also establish a public leaderboard for the community to benchmark new methodologies with pseudo-simulation. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.
SIMSplat: Predictive Driving Scene Editing with Language-aligned 4D Gaussian Splatting
Driving scene manipulation with sensor data is emerging as a promising alternative to traditional virtual driving simulators. However, existing frameworks struggle to generate realistic scenarios efficiently due to limited editing capabilities. To address these challenges, we present SIMSplat, a predictive driving scene editor with language-aligned Gaussian splatting. As a language-controlled editor, SIMSplat enables intuitive manipulation using natural language prompts. By aligning language with Gaussian-reconstructed scenes, it further supports direct querying of road objects, allowing precise and flexible editing. Our method provides detailed object-level editing, including adding new objects and modifying the trajectories of both vehicles and pedestrians, while also incorporating predictive path refinement through multi-agent motion prediction to generate realistic interactions among all agents in the scene. Experiments on the Waymo dataset demonstrate SIMSplat's extensive editing capabilities and adaptability across a wide range of scenarios. Project page: https://sungyeonparkk.github.io/simsplat/
DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation
Closed-loop simulation is essential for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Contemporary sensor simulation methods, such as NeRF and 3DGS, rely predominantly on conditions closely aligned with training data distributions, which are largely confined to forward-driving scenarios. Consequently, these methods face limitations when rendering complex maneuvers (e.g., lane change, acceleration, deceleration). Recent advancements in autonomous-driving world models have demonstrated the potential to generate diverse driving videos. However, these approaches remain constrained to 2D video generation, inherently lacking the spatiotemporal coherence required to capture intricacies of dynamic driving environments. In this paper, we introduce DriveDreamer4D, which enhances 4D driving scene representation leveraging world model priors. Specifically, we utilize the world model as a data machine to synthesize novel trajectory videos based on real-world driving data. Notably, we explicitly leverage structured conditions to control the spatial-temporal consistency of foreground and background elements, thus the generated data adheres closely to traffic constraints. To our knowledge, DriveDreamer4D is the first to utilize video generation models for improving 4D reconstruction in driving scenarios. Experimental results reveal that DriveDreamer4D significantly enhances generation quality under novel trajectory views, achieving a relative improvement in FID by 24.5%, 39.0%, and 10.5% compared to PVG, S3Gaussian, and Deformable-GS. Moreover, DriveDreamer4D markedly enhances the spatiotemporal coherence of driving agents, which is verified by a comprehensive user study and the relative increases of 20.3%, 42.0%, and 13.7% in the NTA-IoU metric.
Digital Quadruplets for Cyber-Physical-Social Systems based Parallel Driving: From Concept to Applications
Digital quadruplets aiming to improve road safety, traffic efficiency, and driving cooperation for future connected automated vehicles are proposed with the enlightenment of ACP based parallel driving. The ACP method denotes Artificial societies, Computational experiments, and Parallel execution modules for cyber-physical-social systems. Four agents are designed in the framework of digital quadruplets: descriptive vehicles, predictive vehicles, prescriptive vehicles, and real vehicles. The three virtual vehicles (descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive) dynamically interact with the real one in order to enhance the safety and performance of the real vehicle. The details of the three virtual vehicles in the digital quadruplets are described. Then, the interactions between the virtual and real vehicles are presented. The experimental results of the digital quadruplets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Drive&Gen: Co-Evaluating End-to-End Driving and Video Generation Models
Recent advances in generative models have sparked exciting new possibilities in the field of autonomous vehicles. Specifically, video generation models are now being explored as controllable virtual testing environments. Simultaneously, end-to-end (E2E) driving models have emerged as a streamlined alternative to conventional modular autonomous driving systems, gaining popularity for their simplicity and scalability. However, the application of these techniques to simulation and planning raises important questions. First, while video generation models can generate increasingly realistic videos, can these videos faithfully adhere to the specified conditions and be realistic enough for E2E autonomous planner evaluation? Second, given that data is crucial for understanding and controlling E2E planners, how can we gain deeper insights into their biases and improve their ability to generalize to out-of-distribution scenarios? In this work, we bridge the gap between the driving models and generative world models (Drive&Gen) to address these questions. We propose novel statistical measures leveraging E2E drivers to evaluate the realism of generated videos. By exploiting the controllability of the video generation model, we conduct targeted experiments to investigate distribution gaps affecting E2E planner performance. Finally, we show that synthetic data produced by the video generation model offers a cost-effective alternative to real-world data collection. This synthetic data effectively improves E2E model generalization beyond existing Operational Design Domains, facilitating the expansion of autonomous vehicle services into new operational contexts.
RoCo-Sim: Enhancing Roadside Collaborative Perception through Foreground Simulation
Roadside Collaborative Perception refers to a system where multiple roadside units collaborate to pool their perceptual data, assisting vehicles in enhancing their environmental awareness. Existing roadside perception methods concentrate on model design but overlook data issues like calibration errors, sparse information, and multi-view consistency, leading to poor performance on recent published datasets. To significantly enhance roadside collaborative perception and address critical data issues, we present the first simulation framework RoCo-Sim for road-side collaborative perception. RoCo-Sim is capable of generating diverse, multi-view consistent simulated roadside data through dynamic foreground editing and full-scene style transfer of a single image. RoCo-Sim consists of four components: (1) Camera Extrinsic Optimization ensures accurate 3D to 2D projection for roadside cameras; (2) A novel Multi-View Occlusion-Aware Sampler (MOAS) determines the placement of diverse digital assets within 3D space; (3) DepthSAM innovatively models foreground-background relationships from single-frame fixed-view images, ensuring multi-view consistency of foreground; and (4) Scalable Post-Processing Toolkit generates more realistic and enriched scenes through style transfer and other enhancements. RoCo-Sim significantly improves roadside 3D object detection, outperforming SOTA methods by 83.74 on Rcooper-Intersection and 83.12 on TUMTraf-V2X for AP70. RoCo-Sim fills a critical gap in roadside perception simulation. Code and pre-trained models will be released soon: https://github.com/duyuwen-duen/RoCo-Sim
DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Driving
World models, especially in autonomous driving, are trending and drawing extensive attention due to their capacity for comprehending driving environments. The established world model holds immense potential for the generation of high-quality driving videos, and driving policies for safe maneuvering. However, a critical limitation in relevant research lies in its predominant focus on gaming environments or simulated settings, thereby lacking the representation of real-world driving scenarios. Therefore, we introduce DriveDreamer, a pioneering world model entirely derived from real-world driving scenarios. Regarding that modeling the world in intricate driving scenes entails an overwhelming search space, we propose harnessing the powerful diffusion model to construct a comprehensive representation of the complex environment. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage training pipeline. In the initial phase, DriveDreamer acquires a deep understanding of structured traffic constraints, while the subsequent stage equips it with the ability to anticipate future states. The proposed DriveDreamer is the first world model established from real-world driving scenarios. We instantiate DriveDreamer on the challenging nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments verify that DriveDreamer empowers precise, controllable video generation that faithfully captures the structural constraints of real-world traffic scenarios. Additionally, DriveDreamer enables the generation of realistic and reasonable driving policies, opening avenues for interaction and practical applications.
Incorporating LLMs for Large-Scale Urban Complex Mobility Simulation
This study presents an innovative approach to urban mobility simulation by integrating a Large Language Model (LLM) with Agent-Based Modeling (ABM). Unlike traditional rule-based ABM, the proposed framework leverages LLM to enhance agent diversity and realism by generating synthetic population profiles, allocating routine and occasional locations, and simulating personalized routes. Using real-world data, the simulation models individual behaviors and large-scale mobility patterns in Taipei City. Key insights, such as route heat maps and mode-specific indicators, provide urban planners with actionable information for policy-making. Future work focuses on establishing robust validation frameworks to ensure accuracy and reliability in urban planning applications.
Scalable Multi-modal Model Predictive Control via Duality-based Interaction Predictions
We propose a hierarchical architecture designed for scalable real-time Model Predictive Control (MPC) in complex, multi-modal traffic scenarios. This architecture comprises two key components: 1) RAID-Net, a novel attention-based Recurrent Neural Network that predicts relevant interactions along the MPC prediction horizon between the autonomous vehicle and the surrounding vehicles using Lagrangian duality, and 2) a reduced Stochastic MPC problem that eliminates irrelevant collision avoidance constraints, enhancing computational efficiency. Our approach is demonstrated in a simulated traffic intersection with interactive surrounding vehicles, showcasing a 12x speed-up in solving the motion planning problem. A video demonstrating the proposed architecture in multiple complex traffic scenarios can be found here: https://youtu.be/-pRiOnPb9_c. GitHub: https://github.com/MPC-Berkeley/hmpc_raidnet
Deep Learning based Computer Vision Methods for Complex Traffic Environments Perception: A Review
Computer vision applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and autonomous driving (AD) have gravitated towards deep neural network architectures in recent years. While performance seems to be improving on benchmark datasets, many real-world challenges are yet to be adequately considered in research. This paper conducted an extensive literature review on the applications of computer vision in ITS and AD, and discusses challenges related to data, models, and complex urban environments. The data challenges are associated with the collection and labeling of training data and its relevance to real world conditions, bias inherent in datasets, the high volume of data needed to be processed, and privacy concerns. Deep learning (DL) models are commonly too complex for real-time processing on embedded hardware, lack explainability and generalizability, and are hard to test in real-world settings. Complex urban traffic environments have irregular lighting and occlusions, and surveillance cameras can be mounted at a variety of angles, gather dirt, shake in the wind, while the traffic conditions are highly heterogeneous, with violation of rules and complex interactions in crowded scenarios. Some representative applications that suffer from these problems are traffic flow estimation, congestion detection, autonomous driving perception, vehicle interaction, and edge computing for practical deployment. The possible ways of dealing with the challenges are also explored while prioritizing practical deployment.
SimWorld: A Unified Benchmark for Simulator-Conditioned Scene Generation via World Model
With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, a lack of data has become a major obstacle to enhancing perception model accuracy. Researchers are now exploring controllable data generation using world models to diversify datasets. However, previous work has been limited to studying image generation quality on specific public datasets. There is still relatively little research on how to build data generation engines for real-world application scenes to achieve large-scale data generation for challenging scenes. In this paper, a simulator-conditioned scene generation engine based on world model is proposed. By constructing a simulation system consistent with real-world scenes, simulation data and labels, which serve as the conditions for data generation in the world model, for any scenes can be collected. It is a novel data generation pipeline by combining the powerful scene simulation capabilities of the simulation engine with the robust data generation capabilities of the world model. In addition, a benchmark with proportionally constructed virtual and real data, is provided for exploring the capabilities of world models in real-world scenes. Quantitative results show that these generated images significantly improve downstream perception models performance. Finally, we explored the generative performance of the world model in urban autonomous driving scenarios. All the data and code will be available at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/SimWorld.
CARLA2Real: a tool for reducing the sim2real gap in CARLA simulator
Simulators are indispensable for research in autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, autonomous robots and drones. Despite significant progress in various simulation aspects, such as graphical realism, an evident gap persists between the virtual and real-world environments. Since the ultimate goal is to deploy the autonomous systems in the real world, closing the sim2real gap is of utmost importance. In this paper, we employ a state-of-the-art approach to enhance the photorealism of simulated data, aligning them with the visual characteristics of real-world datasets. Based on this, we developed CARLA2Real, an easy-to-use, publicly available tool (plug-in) for the widely used and open-source CARLA simulator. This tool enhances the output of CARLA in near real-time, achieving a frame rate of 13 FPS, translating it to the visual style and realism of real-world datasets such as Cityscapes, KITTI, and Mapillary Vistas. By employing the proposed tool, we generated synthetic datasets from both the simulator and the enhancement model outputs, including their corresponding ground truth annotations for tasks related to autonomous driving. Then, we performed a number of experiments to evaluate the impact of the proposed approach on feature extraction and semantic segmentation methods when trained on the enhanced synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the sim2real gap is significant and can indeed be reduced by the introduced approach.
Learning to Drive from a World Model
Most self-driving systems rely on hand-coded perception outputs and engineered driving rules. Learning directly from human driving data with an end-to-end method can allow for a training architecture that is simpler and scales well with compute and data. In this work, we propose an end-to-end training architecture that uses real driving data to train a driving policy in an on-policy simulator. We show two different methods of simulation, one with reprojective simulation and one with a learned world model. We show that both methods can be used to train a policy that learns driving behavior without any hand-coded driving rules. We evaluate the performance of these policies in a closed-loop simulation and when deployed in a real-world advanced driver-assistance system.
LLMLight: Large Language Models as Traffic Signal Control Agents
Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is a crucial component in urban traffic management, aiming to optimize road network efficiency and reduce congestion. Traditional methods in TSC, primarily based on transportation engineering and reinforcement learning (RL), often exhibit limitations in generalization across varied traffic scenarios and lack interpretability. This paper presents LLMLight, a novel framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) as decision-making agents for TSC. Specifically, the framework begins by instructing the LLM with a knowledgeable prompt detailing real-time traffic conditions. Leveraging the advanced generalization capabilities of LLMs, LLMLight engages a reasoning and decision-making process akin to human intuition for effective traffic control. Moreover, we build LightGPT, a specialized backbone LLM tailored for TSC tasks. By learning nuanced traffic patterns and control strategies, LightGPT enhances the LLMLight framework cost-effectively. Extensive experiments on nine real-world and synthetic datasets showcase the remarkable effectiveness, generalization ability, and interpretability of LLMLight against nine transportation-based and RL-based baselines.
From Accidents to Insights: Leveraging Multimodal Data for Scenario-Driven ADS Testing
The rapid advancements in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) have necessitated robust software testing to ensure safety and reliability. However, automating the generation of scalable and concrete test scenarios remains a significant challenge. Current scenario-based test case generation methods often face limitations, such as unrealistic scenes and inaccurate vehicle trajectories. These challenges largely result from the loss of map information during data extraction and the lack of an effective verification mechanism to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces TRACE, a scenario-based ADS Test case Generation framework for Critical Scenarios. By leveraging multimodal data to extract challenging scenarios from real-world car crash reports, TRACE constructs numerous critical test cases with less data, significantly enhancing ADS bug detection efficiency. Using in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and self-validation approaches, we use LLMs to extract environmental and road network information from crash reports. For vehicle trajectory planning, data containing map information and vehicle coordinates serves as a knowledge base to build a ChatGPT-based LLM with path-planning capabilities, which we named TrackMate. Based on 50 existing crash reports, our approach successfully tested three ADS models across two simulation platforms, MetaDrive and BeamNG. Of the 290 constructed test scenarios, 127 are identified as critical, as they resulted in vehicle collisions. Additionally, user feedback reveals that TRACE demonstrates superior scenario reconstruction accuracy, with 77.5% of the scenarios being rated as 'mostly or 'totally' consistent, compared to only 27% for the most related SOTA, LCTGen.
DriVerse: Navigation World Model for Driving Simulation via Multimodal Trajectory Prompting and Motion Alignment
This paper presents DriVerse, a generative model for simulating navigation-driven driving scenes from a single image and a future trajectory. Previous autonomous driving world models either directly feed the trajectory or discrete control signals into the generation pipeline, leading to poor alignment between the control inputs and the implicit features of the 2D base generative model, which results in low-fidelity video outputs. Some methods use coarse textual commands or discrete vehicle control signals, which lack the precision to guide fine-grained, trajectory-specific video generation, making them unsuitable for evaluating actual autonomous driving algorithms. DriVerse introduces explicit trajectory guidance in two complementary forms: it tokenizes trajectories into textual prompts using a predefined trend vocabulary for seamless language integration, and converts 3D trajectories into 2D spatial motion priors to enhance control over static content within the driving scene. To better handle dynamic objects, we further introduce a lightweight motion alignment module, which focuses on the inter-frame consistency of dynamic pixels, significantly enhancing the temporal coherence of moving elements over long sequences. With minimal training and no need for additional data, DriVerse outperforms specialized models on future video generation tasks across both the nuScenes and Waymo datasets. The code and models will be released to the public.
Editable Scene Simulation for Autonomous Driving via Collaborative LLM-Agents
Scene simulation in autonomous driving has gained significant attention because of its huge potential for generating customized data. However, existing editable scene simulation approaches face limitations in terms of user interaction efficiency, multi-camera photo-realistic rendering and external digital assets integration. To address these challenges, this paper introduces ChatSim, the first system that enables editable photo-realistic 3D driving scene simulations via natural language commands with external digital assets. To enable editing with high command flexibility,~ChatSim leverages a large language model (LLM) agent collaboration framework. To generate photo-realistic outcomes, ChatSim employs a novel multi-camera neural radiance field method. Furthermore, to unleash the potential of extensive high-quality digital assets, ChatSim employs a novel multi-camera lighting estimation method to achieve scene-consistent assets' rendering. Our experiments on Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that ChatSim can handle complex language commands and generate corresponding photo-realistic scene videos.
Vehicle Energy Dataset (VED), A Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle Energy Consumption Research
We present Vehicle Energy Dataset (VED), a novel large-scale dataset of fuel and energy data collected from 383 personal cars in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. This open dataset captures GPS trajectories of vehicles along with their time-series data of fuel, energy, speed, and auxiliary power usage. A diverse fleet consisting of 264 gasoline vehicles, 92 HEVs, and 27 PHEV/EVs drove in real-world from Nov, 2017 to Nov, 2018, where the data were collected through onboard OBD-II loggers. Driving scenarios range from highways to traffic-dense downtown area in various driving conditions and seasons. In total, VED accumulates approximately 374,000 miles. We discuss participant privacy protection and develop a method to de-identify personally identifiable information while preserving the quality of the data. After the de-identification, we conducted case studies on the dataset to investigate the impacts of factors known to affect fuel economy and identify energy-saving opportunities that hybrid-electric vehicles and eco-driving techniques can provide. The case studies are supplemented with a number of examples to demonstrate how VED can be utilized for vehicle energy and behavior studies. Potential research opportunities include data-driven vehicle energy consumption modeling, driver behavior modeling, machine and deep learning, calibration of traffic simulators, optimal route choice modeling, prediction of human driver behaviors, and decision making of self-driving cars. We believe that VED can be an instrumental asset to the development of future automotive technologies. The dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/gsoh/VED.
Knowledge-Informed Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction at Signalized Intersections for Infrastructure-to-Everything
Multi-agent trajectory prediction at signalized intersections is crucial for developing efficient intelligent transportation systems and safe autonomous driving systems. Due to the complexity of intersection scenarios and the limitations of single-vehicle perception, the performance of vehicle-centric prediction methods has reached a plateau. In this paper, we introduce an Infrastructure-to-Everything (I2X) collaborative prediction scheme. In this scheme, roadside units (RSUs) independently forecast the future trajectories of all vehicles and transmit these predictions unidirectionally to subscribing vehicles. Building on this scheme, we propose I2XTraj, a dedicated infrastructure-based trajectory prediction model. I2XTraj leverages real-time traffic signal states, prior maneuver strategy knowledge, and multi-agent interactions to generate accurate, joint multi-modal trajectory prediction. First, a continuous signal-informed mechanism is proposed to adaptively process real-time traffic signals to guide trajectory proposal generation under varied intersection configurations. Second, a driving strategy awareness mechanism estimates the joint distribution of maneuver strategies by integrating spatial priors of intersection areas with dynamic vehicle states, enabling coverage of the full set of feasible maneuvers. Third, a spatial-temporal-mode attention network models multi-agent interactions to refine and adjust joint trajectory outputs.Finally, I2XTraj is evaluated on two real-world datasets of signalized intersections, the V2X-Seq and the SinD drone dataset. In both single-infrastructure and online collaborative scenarios, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by over 30\% on V2X-Seq and 15\% on SinD, demonstrating strong generalizability and robustness.
StyledStreets: Multi-style Street Simulator with Spatial and Temporal Consistency
Urban scene reconstruction requires modeling both static infrastructure and dynamic elements while supporting diverse environmental conditions. We present StyledStreets, a multi-style street simulator that achieves instruction-driven scene editing with guaranteed spatial and temporal consistency. Building on a state-of-the-art Gaussian Splatting framework for street scenarios enhanced by our proposed pose optimization and multi-view training, our method enables photorealistic style transfers across seasons, weather conditions, and camera setups through three key innovations: First, a hybrid embedding scheme disentangles persistent scene geometry from transient style attributes, allowing realistic environmental edits while preserving structural integrity. Second, uncertainty-aware rendering mitigates supervision noise from diffusion priors, enabling robust training across extreme style variations. Third, a unified parametric model prevents geometric drift through regularized updates, maintaining multi-view consistency across seven vehicle-mounted cameras. Our framework preserves the original scene's motion patterns and geometric relationships. Qualitative results demonstrate plausible transitions between diverse conditions (snow, sandstorm, night), while quantitative evaluations show state-of-the-art geometric accuracy under style transfers. The approach establishes new capabilities for urban simulation, with applications in autonomous vehicle testing and augmented reality systems requiring reliable environmental consistency. Codes will be publicly available upon publication.
OASim: an Open and Adaptive Simulator based on Neural Rendering for Autonomous Driving
With deep learning and computer vision technology development, autonomous driving provides new solutions to improve traffic safety and efficiency. The importance of building high-quality datasets is self-evident, especially with the rise of end-to-end autonomous driving algorithms in recent years. Data plays a core role in the algorithm closed-loop system. However, collecting real-world data is expensive, time-consuming, and unsafe. With the development of implicit rendering technology and in-depth research on using generative models to produce data at scale, we propose OASim, an open and adaptive simulator and autonomous driving data generator based on implicit neural rendering. It has the following characteristics: (1) High-quality scene reconstruction through neural implicit surface reconstruction technology. (2) Trajectory editing of the ego vehicle and participating vehicles. (3) Rich vehicle model library that can be freely selected and inserted into the scene. (4) Rich sensors model library where you can select specified sensors to generate data. (5) A highly customizable data generation system can generate data according to user needs. We demonstrate the high quality and fidelity of the generated data through perception performance evaluation on the Carla simulator and real-world data acquisition. Code is available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/OASim.
Learning 3D Particle-based Simulators from RGB-D Videos
Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Traditional analytic simulators sometimes struggle to capture sufficiently realistic simulation which can lead to problems including the well known "sim-to-real" gap in robotics. Learned simulators have emerged as an alternative for better capturing real-world physical dynamics, but require access to privileged ground truth physics information such as precise object geometry or particle tracks. Here we propose a method for learning simulators directly from observations. Visual Particle Dynamics (VPD) jointly learns a latent particle-based representation of 3D scenes, a neural simulator of the latent particle dynamics, and a renderer that can produce images of the scene from arbitrary views. VPD learns end to end from posed RGB-D videos and does not require access to privileged information. Unlike existing 2D video prediction models, we show that VPD's 3D structure enables scene editing and long-term predictions. These results pave the way for downstream applications ranging from video editing to robotic planning.
DreamForge: Motion-Aware Autoregressive Video Generation for Multi-View Driving Scenes
Recent advances in diffusion models have improved controllable streetscape generation and supported downstream perception and planning tasks. However, challenges remain in accurately modeling driving scenes and generating long videos. To alleviate these issues, we propose DreamForge, an advanced diffusion-based autoregressive video generation model tailored for 3D-controllable long-term generation. To enhance the lane and foreground generation, we introduce perspective guidance and integrate object-wise position encoding to incorporate local 3D correlation and improve foreground object modeling. We also propose motion-aware temporal attention to capture motion cues and appearance changes in videos. By leveraging motion frames and an autoregressive generation paradigm,we can autoregressively generate long videos (over 200 frames) using a model trained in short sequences, achieving superior quality compared to the baseline in 16-frame video evaluations. Finally, we integrate our method with the realistic simulator DriveArena to provide more reliable open-loop and closed-loop evaluations for vision-based driving agents. Project Page: https://pjlab-adg.github.io/DriveArena/dreamforge.
UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator
Rigorously testing autonomy systems is essential for making safe self-driving vehicles (SDV) a reality. It requires one to generate safety critical scenarios beyond what can be collected safely in the world, as many scenarios happen rarely on public roads. To accurately evaluate performance, we need to test the SDV on these scenarios in closed-loop, where the SDV and other actors interact with each other at each timestep. Previously recorded driving logs provide a rich resource to build these new scenarios from, but for closed loop evaluation, we need to modify the sensor data based on the new scene configuration and the SDV's decisions, as actors might be added or removed and the trajectories of existing actors and the SDV will differ from the original log. In this paper, we present UniSim, a neural sensor simulator that takes a single recorded log captured by a sensor-equipped vehicle and converts it into a realistic closed-loop multi-sensor simulation. UniSim builds neural feature grids to reconstruct both the static background and dynamic actors in the scene, and composites them together to simulate LiDAR and camera data at new viewpoints, with actors added or removed and at new placements. To better handle extrapolated views, we incorporate learnable priors for dynamic objects, and leverage a convolutional network to complete unseen regions. Our experiments show UniSim can simulate realistic sensor data with small domain gap on downstream tasks. With UniSim, we demonstrate closed-loop evaluation of an autonomy system on safety-critical scenarios as if it were in the real world.
Parallel Bayesian Optimization of Agent-based Transportation Simulation
MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit) is an open source large-scale agent-based transportation planning project applied to various areas like road transport, public transport, freight transport, regional evacuation, etc. BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility) framework extends MATSim to enable powerful and scalable analysis of urban transportation systems. The agents from the BEAM simulation exhibit 'mode choice' behavior based on multinomial logit model. In our study, we consider eight mode choices viz. bike, car, walk, ride hail, driving to transit, walking to transit, ride hail to transit, and ride hail pooling. The 'alternative specific constants' for each mode choice are critical hyperparameters in a configuration file related to a particular scenario under experimentation. We use the 'Urbansim-10k' BEAM scenario (with 10,000 population size) for all our experiments. Since these hyperparameters affect the simulation in complex ways, manual calibration methods are time consuming. We present a parallel Bayesian optimization method with early stopping rule to achieve fast convergence for the given multi-in-multi-out problem to its optimal configurations. Our model is based on an open source HpBandSter package. This approach combines hierarchy of several 1D Kernel Density Estimators (KDE) with a cheap evaluator (Hyperband, a single multidimensional KDE). Our model has also incorporated extrapolation based early stopping rule. With our model, we could achieve a 25% L1 norm for a large-scale BEAM simulation in fully autonomous manner. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first of its kind applied to large-scale multi-agent transportation simulations. This work can be useful for surrogate modeling of scenarios with very large populations.
From Words to Collisions: LLM-Guided Evaluation and Adversarial Generation of Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios
Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles requires virtual scenario-based testing, which depends on the robust evaluation and generation of safety-critical scenarios. So far, researchers have used scenario-based testing frameworks that rely heavily on handcrafted scenarios as safety metrics. To reduce the effort of human interpretation and overcome the limited scalability of these approaches, we combine Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured scenario parsing and prompt engineering to automatically evaluate and generate safety-critical driving scenarios. We introduce Cartesian and Ego-centric prompt strategies for scenario evaluation, and an adversarial generation module that modifies trajectories of risk-inducing vehicles (ego-attackers) to create critical scenarios. We validate our approach using a 2D simulation framework and multiple pre-trained LLMs. The results show that the evaluation module effectively detects collision scenarios and infers scenario safety. Meanwhile, the new generation module identifies high-risk agents and synthesizes realistic, safety-critical scenarios. We conclude that an LLM equipped with domain-informed prompting techniques can effectively evaluate and generate safety-critical driving scenarios, reducing dependence on handcrafted metrics. We release our open-source code and scenarios at: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/From-Words-to-Collisions.
InterAct-Video: Reasoning-Rich Video QA for Urban Traffic
Traffic monitoring is crucial for urban mobility, road safety, and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Deep learning has advanced video-based traffic monitoring through video question answering (VideoQA) models, enabling structured insight extraction from traffic videos. However, existing VideoQA models struggle with the complexity of real-world traffic scenes, where multiple concurrent events unfold across spatiotemporal dimensions. To address these challenges, this paper introduces InterAct VideoQA, a curated dataset designed to benchmark and enhance VideoQA models for traffic monitoring tasks. The InterAct VideoQA dataset comprises 8 hours of real-world traffic footage collected from diverse intersections, segmented into 10-second video clips, with over 25,000 question-answer (QA) pairs covering spatiotemporal dynamics, vehicle interactions, incident detection, and other critical traffic attributes. State-of-the-art VideoQA models are evaluated on InterAct VideoQA, exposing challenges in reasoning over fine-grained spatiotemporal dependencies within complex traffic scenarios. Additionally, fine-tuning these models on InterAct VideoQA yields notable performance improvements, demonstrating the necessity of domain-specific datasets for VideoQA. InterAct VideoQA is publicly available as a benchmark dataset to facilitate future research in real-world deployable VideoQA models for intelligent transportation systems. GitHub Repo: https://github.com/joe-rabbit/InterAct_VideoQA
Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Dataset and Challenge
This paper presents the Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Dataset and Challenge, designed to support research in traffic event analysis, collision prediction, and autonomous vehicle safety. The dataset consists of 1,500 annotated video clips, each approximately 40 seconds long, capturing a diverse range of real-world traffic scenarios. Videos are labeled with event type (collision/near-collision vs. normal driving), environmental conditions (lighting conditions and weather), and scene type (urban, rural, highway, etc.). For collision and near-collision cases, additional temporal labels are provided, including the precise moment of the event and the alert time, marking when the collision first becomes predictable. To advance research on accident prediction, we introduce the Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Challenge, a public competition on top of this dataset. Participants are tasked with developing machine learning models that predict the likelihood of an imminent collision, given an input video. Model performance is evaluated using the average precision (AP) computed across multiple intervals before the accident (i.e. 500 ms, 1000 ms, and 1500 ms prior to the event), emphasizing the importance of early and reliable predictions. The dataset is released under an open license with restrictions on unethical use, ensuring responsible research and innovation.
Traffic Light Control with Reinforcement Learning
Traffic light control is important for reducing congestion in urban mobility systems. This paper proposes a real-time traffic light control method using deep Q learning. Our approach incorporates a reward function considering queue lengths, delays, travel time, and throughput. The model dynamically decides phase changes based on current traffic conditions. The training of the deep Q network involves an offline stage from pre-generated data with fixed schedules and an online stage using real-time traffic data. A deep Q network structure with a "phase gate" component is used to simplify the model's learning task under different phases. A "memory palace" mechanism is used to address sample imbalance during the training process. We validate our approach using both synthetic and real-world traffic flow data on a road intersecting in Hangzhou, China. Results demonstrate significant performance improvements of the proposed method in reducing vehicle waiting time (57.1% to 100%), queue lengths (40.9% to 100%), and total travel time (16.8% to 68.0%) compared to traditional fixed signal plans.
Rethinking Driving World Model as Synthetic Data Generator for Perception Tasks
Recent advancements in driving world models enable controllable generation of high-quality RGB videos or multimodal videos. Existing methods primarily focus on metrics related to generation quality and controllability. However, they often overlook the evaluation of downstream perception tasks, which are really crucial for the performance of autonomous driving. Existing methods usually leverage a training strategy that first pretrains on synthetic data and finetunes on real data, resulting in twice the epochs compared to the baseline (real data only). When we double the epochs in the baseline, the benefit of synthetic data becomes negligible. To thoroughly demonstrate the benefit of synthetic data, we introduce Dream4Drive, a novel synthetic data generation framework designed for enhancing the downstream perception tasks. Dream4Drive first decomposes the input video into several 3D-aware guidance maps and subsequently renders the 3D assets onto these guidance maps. Finally, the driving world model is fine-tuned to produce the edited, multi-view photorealistic videos, which can be used to train the downstream perception models. Dream4Drive enables unprecedented flexibility in generating multi-view corner cases at scale, significantly boosting corner case perception in autonomous driving. To facilitate future research, we also contribute a large-scale 3D asset dataset named DriveObj3D, covering the typical categories in driving scenarios and enabling diverse 3D-aware video editing. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that Dream4Drive can effectively boost the performance of downstream perception models under various training epochs. Page: https://wm-research.github.io/Dream4Drive/ GitHub Link: https://github.com/wm-research/Dream4Drive
Scaling Face Interaction Graph Networks to Real World Scenes
Accurately simulating real world object dynamics is essential for various applications such as robotics, engineering, graphics, and design. To better capture complex real dynamics such as contact and friction, learned simulators based on graph networks have recently shown great promise. However, applying these learned simulators to real scenes comes with two major challenges: first, scaling learned simulators to handle the complexity of real world scenes which can involve hundreds of objects each with complicated 3D shapes, and second, handling inputs from perception rather than 3D state information. Here we introduce a method which substantially reduces the memory required to run graph-based learned simulators. Based on this memory-efficient simulation model, we then present a perceptual interface in the form of editable NeRFs which can convert real-world scenes into a structured representation that can be processed by graph network simulator. We show that our method uses substantially less memory than previous graph-based simulators while retaining their accuracy, and that the simulators learned in synthetic environments can be applied to real world scenes captured from multiple camera angles. This paves the way for expanding the application of learned simulators to settings where only perceptual information is available at inference time.
CitySim: Modeling Urban Behaviors and City Dynamics with Large-Scale LLM-Driven Agent Simulation
Modeling human behavior in urban environments is fundamental for social science, behavioral studies, and urban planning. Prior work often rely on rigid, hand-crafted rules, limiting their ability to simulate nuanced intentions, plans, and adaptive behaviors. Addressing these challenges, we envision an urban simulator (CitySim), capitalizing on breakthroughs in human-level intelligence exhibited by large language models. In CitySim, agents generate realistic daily schedules using a recursive value-driven approach that balances mandatory activities, personal habits, and situational factors. To enable long-term, lifelike simulations, we endow agents with beliefs, long-term goals, and spatial memory for navigation. CitySim exhibits closer alignment with real humans than prior work, both at micro and macro levels. Additionally, we conduct insightful experiments by modeling tens of thousands of agents and evaluating their collective behaviors under various real-world scenarios, including estimating crowd density, predicting place popularity, and assessing well-being. Our results highlight CitySim as a scalable, flexible testbed for understanding and forecasting urban phenomena.
Extrapolated Urban View Synthesis Benchmark
Photorealistic simulators are essential for the training and evaluation of vision-centric autonomous vehicles (AVs). At their core is Novel View Synthesis (NVS), a crucial capability that generates diverse unseen viewpoints to accommodate the broad and continuous pose distribution of AVs. Recent advances in radiance fields, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, achieve photorealistic rendering at real-time speeds and have been widely used in modeling large-scale driving scenes. However, their performance is commonly evaluated using an interpolated setup with highly correlated training and test views. In contrast, extrapolation, where test views largely deviate from training views, remains underexplored, limiting progress in generalizable simulation technology. To address this gap, we leverage publicly available AV datasets with multiple traversals, multiple vehicles, and multiple cameras to build the first Extrapolated Urban View Synthesis (EUVS) benchmark. Meanwhile, we conduct quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art Gaussian Splatting methods across different difficulty levels. Our results show that Gaussian Splatting is prone to overfitting to training views. Besides, incorporating diffusion priors and improving geometry cannot fundamentally improve NVS under large view changes, highlighting the need for more robust approaches and large-scale training. We have released our data to help advance self-driving and urban robotics simulation technology.
RAP: 3D Rasterization Augmented End-to-End Planning
Imitation learning for end-to-end driving trains policies only on expert demonstrations. Once deployed in a closed loop, such policies lack recovery data: small mistakes cannot be corrected and quickly compound into failures. A promising direction is to generate alternative viewpoints and trajectories beyond the logged path. Prior work explores photorealistic digital twins via neural rendering or game engines, but these methods are prohibitively slow and costly, and thus mainly used for evaluation. In this work, we argue that photorealism is unnecessary for training end-to-end planners. What matters is semantic fidelity and scalability: driving depends on geometry and dynamics, not textures or lighting. Motivated by this, we propose 3D Rasterization, which replaces costly rendering with lightweight rasterization of annotated primitives, enabling augmentations such as counterfactual recovery maneuvers and cross-agent view synthesis. To transfer these synthetic views effectively to real-world deployment, we introduce a Raster-to-Real feature-space alignment that bridges the sim-to-real gap. Together, these components form Rasterization Augmented Planning (RAP), a scalable data augmentation pipeline for planning. RAP achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop robustness and long-tail generalization, ranking first on four major benchmarks: NAVSIM v1/v2, Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, and Bench2Drive. Our results show that lightweight rasterization with feature alignment suffices to scale E2E training, offering a practical alternative to photorealistic rendering. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/RAP/.
Conversational Code Generation: a Case Study of Designing a Dialogue System for Generating Driving Scenarios for Testing Autonomous Vehicles
Cyber-physical systems like autonomous vehicles are tested in simulation before deployment, using domain-specific programs for scenario specification. To aid the testing of autonomous vehicles in simulation, we design a natural language interface, using an instruction-following large language model, to assist a non-coding domain expert in synthesising the desired scenarios and vehicle behaviours. We show that using it to convert utterances to the symbolic program is feasible, despite the very small training dataset. Human experiments show that dialogue is critical to successful simulation generation, leading to a 4.5 times higher success rate than a generation without engaging in extended conversation.
Cosmos-Drive-Dreams: Scalable Synthetic Driving Data Generation with World Foundation Models
Collecting and annotating real-world data for safety-critical physical AI systems, such as Autonomous Vehicle (AV), is time-consuming and costly. It is especially challenging to capture rare edge cases, which play a critical role in training and testing of an AV system. To address this challenge, we introduce the Cosmos-Drive-Dreams - a synthetic data generation (SDG) pipeline that aims to generate challenging scenarios to facilitate downstream tasks such as perception and driving policy training. Powering this pipeline is Cosmos-Drive, a suite of models specialized from NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation model for the driving domain and are capable of controllable, high-fidelity, multi-view, and spatiotemporally consistent driving video generation. We showcase the utility of these models by applying Cosmos-Drive-Dreams to scale the quantity and diversity of driving datasets with high-fidelity and challenging scenarios. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our generated data helps in mitigating long-tail distribution problems and enhances generalization in downstream tasks such as 3D lane detection, 3D object detection and driving policy learning. We open source our pipeline toolkit, dataset and model weights through the NVIDIA's Cosmos platform. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/cosmos_drive_dreams
Virtual Nodes Improve Long-term Traffic Prediction
Effective traffic prediction is a cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems, enabling precise forecasts of traffic flow, speed, and congestion. While traditional spatio-temporal graph neural networks (ST-GNNs) have achieved notable success in short-term traffic forecasting, their performance in long-term predictions remains limited. This challenge arises from over-squashing problem, where bottlenecks and limited receptive fields restrict information flow and hinder the modeling of global dependencies. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel framework that incorporates virtual nodes, which are additional nodes added to the graph and connected to existing nodes, in order to aggregate information across the entire graph within a single GNN layer. Our proposed model incorporates virtual nodes by constructing a semi-adaptive adjacency matrix. This matrix integrates distance-based and adaptive adjacency matrices, allowing the model to leverage geographical information while also learning task-specific features from data. Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of virtual nodes significantly enhances long-term prediction accuracy while also improving layer-wise sensitivity to mitigate the over-squashing problem. Virtual nodes also offer enhanced explainability by focusing on key intersections and high-traffic areas, as shown by the visualization of their adjacency matrix weights on road network heat maps. Our advanced approach enhances the understanding and management of urban traffic systems, making it particularly well-suited for real-world applications.
Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators
Generative models trained on internet data have revolutionized how text, image, and video content can be created. Perhaps the next milestone for generative models is to simulate realistic experience in response to actions taken by humans, robots, and other interactive agents. Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies, to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world. We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling. We first make the important observation that natural datasets available for learning a real-world simulator are often rich along different axes (e.g., abundant objects in image data, densely sampled actions in robotics data, and diverse movements in navigation data). With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects. There are numerous use cases for such a real-world simulator. As an example, we use UniSim to train both high-level vision-language planners and low-level reinforcement learning policies, each of which exhibit zero-shot real-world transfer after training purely in a learned real-world simulator. We also show that other types of intelligence such as video captioning models can benefit from training with simulated experience in UniSim, opening up even wider applications. Video demos can be found at https://universal-simulator.github.io.
UL-DD: A Multimodal Drowsiness Dataset Using Video, Biometric Signals, and Behavioral Data
In this study, we present a comprehensive public dataset for driver drowsiness detection, integrating multimodal signals of facial, behavioral, and biometric indicators. Our dataset includes 3D facial video using a depth camera, IR camera footage, posterior videos, and biometric signals such as heart rate, electrodermal activity, blood oxygen saturation, skin temperature, and accelerometer data. This data set provides grip sensor data from the steering wheel and telemetry data from the American truck simulator game to provide more information about drivers' behavior while they are alert and drowsy. Drowsiness levels were self-reported every four minutes using the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS). The simulation environment consists of three monitor setups, and the driving condition is completely like a car. Data were collected from 19 subjects (15 M, 4 F) in two conditions: when they were fully alert and when they exhibited signs of sleepiness. Unlike other datasets, our multimodal dataset has a continuous duration of 40 minutes for each data collection session per subject, contributing to a total length of 1,400 minutes, and we recorded gradual changes in the driver state rather than discrete alert/drowsy labels. This study aims to create a comprehensive multimodal dataset of driver drowsiness that captures a wider range of physiological, behavioral, and driving-related signals. The dataset will be available upon request to the corresponding author.
Forecasting Trajectory and Behavior of Road-Agents Using Spectral Clustering in Graph-LSTMs
We present a novel approach for traffic forecasting in urban traffic scenarios using a combination of spectral graph analysis and deep learning. We predict both the low-level information (future trajectories) as well as the high-level information (road-agent behavior) from the extracted trajectory of each road-agent. Our formulation represents the proximity between the road agents using a weighted dynamic geometric graph (DGG). We use a two-stream graph-LSTM network to perform traffic forecasting using these weighted DGGs. The first stream predicts the spatial coordinates of road-agents, while the second stream predicts whether a road-agent is going to exhibit overspeeding, underspeeding, or neutral behavior by modeling spatial interactions between road-agents. Additionally, we propose a new regularization algorithm based on spectral clustering to reduce the error margin in long-term prediction (3-5 seconds) and improve the accuracy of the predicted trajectories. Moreover, we prove a theoretical upper bound on the regularized prediction error. We evaluate our approach on the Argoverse, Lyft, Apolloscape, and NGSIM datasets and highlight the benefits over prior trajectory prediction methods. In practice, our approach reduces the average prediction error by approximately 75% over prior algorithms and achieves a weighted average accuracy of 91.2% for behavior prediction. Additionally, our spectral regularization improves long-term prediction by up to 70%.
UniMLVG: Unified Framework for Multi-view Long Video Generation with Comprehensive Control Capabilities for Autonomous Driving
The creation of diverse and realistic driving scenarios has become essential to enhance perception and planning capabilities of the autonomous driving system. However, generating long-duration, surround-view consistent driving videos remains a significant challenge. To address this, we present UniMLVG, a unified framework designed to generate extended street multi-perspective videos under precise control. By integrating single- and multi-view driving videos into the training data, our approach updates cross-frame and cross-view modules across three stages with different training objectives, substantially boosting the diversity and quality of generated visual content. Additionally, we employ the explicit viewpoint modeling in multi-view video generation to effectively improve motion transition consistency. Capable of handling various input reference formats (e.g., text, images, or video), our UniMLVG generates high-quality multi-view videos according to the corresponding condition constraints such as 3D bounding boxes or frame-level text descriptions. Compared to the best models with similar capabilities, our framework achieves improvements of 21.4% in FID and 36.5% in FVD.
Advance Real-time Detection of Traffic Incidents in Highways using Vehicle Trajectory Data
A significant number of traffic crashes are secondary crashes that occur because of an earlier incident on the road. Thus, early detection of traffic incidents is crucial for road users from safety perspectives with a potential to reduce the risk of secondary crashes. The wide availability of GPS devices now-a-days gives an opportunity of tracking and recording vehicle trajectories. The objective of this study is to use vehicle trajectory data for advance real-time detection of traffic incidents on highways using machine learning-based algorithms. The study uses three days of unevenly sequenced vehicle trajectory data and traffic incident data on I-10, one of the most crash-prone highways in Louisiana. Vehicle trajectories are converted to trajectories based on virtual detector locations to maintain spatial uniformity as well as to generate historical traffic data for machine learning algorithms. Trips matched with traffic incidents on the way are separated and along with other trips with similar spatial attributes are used to build a database for modeling. Multiple machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boost, and Artificial Neural Network models are used to detect a trajectory that is likely to face an incident in the downstream road section. Results suggest that the Random Forest model achieves the best performance for predicting an incident with reasonable recall value and discrimination capability.
TESTAM: A Time-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Attention Model with Mixture of Experts
Accurate traffic forecasting is challenging due to the complex dependency on road networks, various types of roads, and the abrupt speed change due to the events. Recent works mainly focus on dynamic spatial modeling with adaptive graph embedding or graph attention having less consideration for temporal characteristics and in-situ modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model named TESTAM, which individually models recurring and non-recurring traffic patterns by a mixture-of-experts model with three experts on temporal modeling, spatio-temporal modeling with static graph, and dynamic spatio-temporal dependency modeling with dynamic graph. By introducing different experts and properly routing them, TESTAM could better model various circumstances, including spatially isolated nodes, highly related nodes, and recurring and non-recurring events. For the proper routing, we reformulate a gating problem into a classification problem with pseudo labels. Experimental results on three public traffic network datasets, METR-LA, PEMS-BAY, and EXPY-TKY, demonstrate that TESTAM achieves a better indication and modeling of recurring and non-recurring traffic. We published the official code at https://github.com/HyunWookL/TESTAM
Speed and Density Planning for a Speed-Constrained Robot Swarm Through a Virtual Tube
The planning and control of a robot swarm in a complex environment have attracted increasing attention. To this end, the idea of virtual tubes has been taken up in our previous work. Specifically, a virtual tube with varying widths has been planned to avoid collisions with obstacles in a complex environment. Based on the planned virtual tube for a large number of speed-constrained robots, the average forward speed and density along the virtual tube are further planned in this paper to ensure safety and improve efficiency. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed method is based on global information and can be applied to traversing narrow spaces for speed-constrained robot swarms. Numerical simulations and experiments are conducted to show that the safety and efficiency of the passing-through process are improved. A video about simulations and experiments is available on https://youtu.be/lJHdMQMqSpc.
METEOR:A Dense, Heterogeneous, and Unstructured Traffic Dataset With Rare Behaviors
We present a new traffic dataset, METEOR, which captures traffic patterns and multi-agent driving behaviors in unstructured scenarios. METEOR consists of more than 1000 one-minute videos, over 2 million annotated frames with bounding boxes and GPS trajectories for 16 unique agent categories, and more than 13 million bounding boxes for traffic agents. METEOR is a dataset for rare and interesting, multi-agent driving behaviors that are grouped into traffic violations, atypical interactions, and diverse scenarios. Every video in METEOR is tagged using a diverse range of factors corresponding to weather, time of the day, road conditions, and traffic density. We use METEOR to benchmark perception methods for object detection and multi-agent behavior prediction. Our key finding is that state-of-the-art models for object detection and behavior prediction, which otherwise succeed on existing datasets such as Waymo, fail on the METEOR dataset. METEOR marks the first step towards the development of more sophisticated perception models for dense, heterogeneous, and unstructured scenarios.
Online Test-Time Adaptation of Spatial-Temporal Traffic Flow Forecasting
Accurate spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting is crucial in aiding traffic managers in implementing control measures and assisting drivers in selecting optimal travel routes. Traditional deep-learning based methods for traffic flow forecasting typically rely on historical data to train their models, which are then used to make predictions on future data. However, the performance of the trained model usually degrades due to the temporal drift between the historical and future data. To make the model trained on historical data better adapt to future data in a fully online manner, this paper conducts the first study of the online test-time adaptation techniques for spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting problems. To this end, we propose an Adaptive Double Correction by Series Decomposition (ADCSD) method, which first decomposes the output of the trained model into seasonal and trend-cyclical parts and then corrects them by two separate modules during the testing phase using the latest observed data entry by entry. In the proposed ADCSD method, instead of fine-tuning the whole trained model during the testing phase, a lite network is attached after the trained model, and only the lite network is fine-tuned in the testing process each time a data entry is observed. Moreover, to satisfy that different time series variables may have different levels of temporal drift, two adaptive vectors are adopted to provide different weights for different time series variables. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic flow forecasting datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ADCSD method. The code is available at https://github.com/Pengxin-Guo/ADCSD.
Re^3Sim: Generating High-Fidelity Simulation Data via 3D-Photorealistic Real-to-Sim for Robotic Manipulation
Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE^3SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE^3SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with an average success rate exceeding 58%. To push the limit of real-to-sim, we further generate a large-scale simulation dataset, demonstrating how a robust policy can be built from simulation data that generalizes across various objects. Codes and demos are available at: http://xshenhan.github.io/Re3Sim/.
SEPT: Towards Efficient Scene Representation Learning for Motion Prediction
Motion prediction is crucial for autonomous vehicles to operate safely in complex traffic environments. Extracting effective spatiotemporal relationships among traffic elements is key to accurate forecasting. Inspired by the successful practice of pretrained large language models, this paper presents SEPT, a modeling framework that leverages self-supervised learning to develop powerful spatiotemporal understanding for complex traffic scenes. Specifically, our approach involves three masking-reconstruction modeling tasks on scene inputs including agents' trajectories and road network, pretraining the scene encoder to capture kinematics within trajectory, spatial structure of road network, and interactions among roads and agents. The pretrained encoder is then finetuned on the downstream forecasting task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEPT, without elaborate architectural design or manual feature engineering, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse 1 and Argoverse 2 motion forecasting benchmarks, outperforming previous methods on all main metrics by a large margin.
IDD-3D: Indian Driving Dataset for 3D Unstructured Road Scenes
Autonomous driving and assistance systems rely on annotated data from traffic and road scenarios to model and learn the various object relations in complex real-world scenarios. Preparation and training of deploy-able deep learning architectures require the models to be suited to different traffic scenarios and adapt to different situations. Currently, existing datasets, while large-scale, lack such diversities and are geographically biased towards mainly developed cities. An unstructured and complex driving layout found in several developing countries such as India poses a challenge to these models due to the sheer degree of variations in the object types, densities, and locations. To facilitate better research toward accommodating such scenarios, we build a new dataset, IDD-3D, which consists of multi-modal data from multiple cameras and LiDAR sensors with 12k annotated driving LiDAR frames across various traffic scenarios. We discuss the need for this dataset through statistical comparisons with existing datasets and highlight benchmarks on standard 3D object detection and tracking tasks in complex layouts. Code and data available at https://github.com/shubham1810/idd3d_kit.git
A Bayesian Approach to Reinforcement Learning of Vision-Based Vehicular Control
In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method for autonomous driving. Our approach employs temporal difference learning in a Bayesian framework to learn vehicle control signals from sensor data. The agent has access to images from a forward facing camera, which are preprocessed to generate semantic segmentation maps. We trained our system using both ground truth and estimated semantic segmentation input. Based on our observations from a large set of experiments, we conclude that training the system on ground truth input data leads to better performance than training the system on estimated input even if estimated input is used for evaluation. The system is trained and evaluated in a realistic simulated urban environment using the CARLA simulator. The simulator also contains a benchmark that allows for comparing to other systems and methods. The required training time of the system is shown to be lower and the performance on the benchmark superior to competing approaches.
AccidentBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning in Vehicle Accidents and Beyond
Rapid advances in multimodal models demand benchmarks that rigorously evaluate understanding and reasoning in safety-critical, dynamic real-world settings. We present AccidentBench, a large-scale benchmark that combines vehicle accident scenarios with Beyond domains, safety-critical settings in air and water that emphasize spatial and temporal reasoning (e.g., navigation, orientation, multi-vehicle motion). The benchmark contains approximately 2000 videos and over 19000 human-annotated question--answer pairs spanning multiple video lengths (short/medium/long) and difficulty levels (easy/medium/hard). Tasks systematically probe core capabilities: temporal, spatial, and intent understanding and reasoning. By unifying accident-centric traffic scenes with broader safety-critical scenarios in air and water, AccidentBench offers a comprehensive, physically grounded testbed for evaluating models under real-world variability. Evaluations of state-of-the-art models (e.g., Gemini-2.5 Pro and GPT-5) show that even the strongest models achieve only about 18% accuracy on the hardest tasks and longest videos, revealing substantial gaps in real-world temporal, spatial, and intent reasoning. AccidentBench is designed to expose these critical gaps and drive the development of multimodal models that are safer, more robust, and better aligned with real-world safety-critical challenges. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/AccidentBench
DriveCamSim: Generalizable Camera Simulation via Explicit Camera Modeling for Autonomous Driving
Camera sensor simulation serves as a critical role for autonomous driving (AD), e.g. evaluating vision-based AD algorithms. While existing approaches have leveraged generative models for controllable image/video generation, they remain constrained to generating multi-view video sequences with fixed camera viewpoints and video frequency, significantly limiting their downstream applications. To address this, we present a generalizable camera simulation framework DriveCamSim, whose core innovation lies in the proposed Explicit Camera Modeling (ECM) mechanism. Instead of implicit interaction through vanilla attention, ECM establishes explicit pixel-wise correspondences across multi-view and multi-frame dimensions, decoupling the model from overfitting to the specific camera configurations (intrinsic/extrinsic parameters, number of views) and temporal sampling rates presented in the training data. For controllable generation, we identify the issue of information loss inherent in existing conditional encoding and injection pipelines, proposing an information-preserving control mechanism. This control mechanism not only improves conditional controllability, but also can be extended to be identity-aware to enhance temporal consistency in foreground object rendering. With above designs, our model demonstrates superior performance in both visual quality and controllability, as well as generalization capability across spatial-level (camera parameters variations) and temporal-level (video frame rate variations), enabling flexible user-customizable camera simulation tailored to diverse application scenarios. Code will be avaliable at https://github.com/swc-17/DriveCamSim for facilitating future research.
Demonstrating Wheeled Lab: Modern Sim2Real for Low-cost, Open-source Wheeled Robotics
Simulation has been pivotal in recent robotics milestones and is poised to play a prominent role in the field's future. However, recent robotic advances often rely on expensive and high-maintenance platforms, limiting access to broader robotics audiences. This work introduces Wheeled Lab, a framework for the low-cost, open-source wheeled platforms that are already widely established in education and research. Through integration with Isaac Lab, Wheeled Lab introduces modern techniques in Sim2Real, such as domain randomization, sensor simulation, and end-to-end learning, to new user communities. To kickstart education and demonstrate the framework's capabilities, we develop three state-of-the-art policies for small-scale RC cars: controlled drifting, elevation traversal, and visual navigation, each trained in simulation and deployed in the real world. By bridging the gap between advanced Sim2Real methods and affordable, available robotics, Wheeled Lab aims to democratize access to cutting-edge tools, fostering innovation and education in a broader robotics context. The full stack, from hardware to software, is low cost and open-source.
Is Sora a World Simulator? A Comprehensive Survey on General World Models and Beyond
General world models represent a crucial pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications ranging from virtual environments to decision-making systems. Recently, the emergence of the Sora model has attained significant attention due to its remarkable simulation capabilities, which exhibits an incipient comprehension of physical laws. In this survey, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in world models. Our analysis navigates through the forefront of generative methodologies in video generation, where world models stand as pivotal constructs facilitating the synthesis of highly realistic visual content. Additionally, we scrutinize the burgeoning field of autonomous-driving world models, meticulously delineating their indispensable role in reshaping transportation and urban mobility. Furthermore, we delve into the intricacies inherent in world models deployed within autonomous agents, shedding light on their profound significance in enabling intelligent interactions within dynamic environmental contexts. At last, we examine challenges and limitations of world models, and discuss their potential future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a foundational reference for the research community and inspire continued innovation. This survey will be regularly updated at: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/General-World-Models-Survey.
Learning to Fly by Crashing
How do you learn to navigate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and avoid obstacles? One approach is to use a small dataset collected by human experts: however, high capacity learning algorithms tend to overfit when trained with little data. An alternative is to use simulation. But the gap between simulation and real world remains large especially for perception problems. The reason most research avoids using large-scale real data is the fear of crashes! In this paper, we propose to bite the bullet and collect a dataset of crashes itself! We build a drone whose sole purpose is to crash into objects: it samples naive trajectories and crashes into random objects. We crash our drone 11,500 times to create one of the biggest UAV crash dataset. This dataset captures the different ways in which a UAV can crash. We use all this negative flying data in conjunction with positive data sampled from the same trajectories to learn a simple yet powerful policy for UAV navigation. We show that this simple self-supervised model is quite effective in navigating the UAV even in extremely cluttered environments with dynamic obstacles including humans. For supplementary video see: https://youtu.be/u151hJaGKUo
V2X-Seq: A Large-Scale Sequential Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Perception and Forecasting
Utilizing infrastructure and vehicle-side information to track and forecast the behaviors of surrounding traffic participants can significantly improve decision-making and safety in autonomous driving. However, the lack of real-world sequential datasets limits research in this area. To address this issue, we introduce V2X-Seq, the first large-scale sequential V2X dataset, which includes data frames, trajectories, vector maps, and traffic lights captured from natural scenery. V2X-Seq comprises two parts: the sequential perception dataset, which includes more than 15,000 frames captured from 95 scenarios, and the trajectory forecasting dataset, which contains about 80,000 infrastructure-view scenarios, 80,000 vehicle-view scenarios, and 50,000 cooperative-view scenarios captured from 28 intersections' areas, covering 672 hours of data. Based on V2X-Seq, we introduce three new tasks for vehicle-infrastructure cooperative (VIC) autonomous driving: VIC3D Tracking, Online-VIC Forecasting, and Offline-VIC Forecasting. We also provide benchmarks for the introduced tasks. Find data, code, and more up-to-date information at https://github.com/AIR-THU/DAIR-V2X-Seq{https://github.com/AIR-THU/DAIR-V2X-Seq}.
Emergent Road Rules In Multi-Agent Driving Environments
For autonomous vehicles to safely share the road with human drivers, autonomous vehicles must abide by specific "road rules" that human drivers have agreed to follow. "Road rules" include rules that drivers are required to follow by law -- such as the requirement that vehicles stop at red lights -- as well as more subtle social rules -- such as the implicit designation of fast lanes on the highway. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that -- instead of hard-coding road rules into self-driving algorithms -- a scalable alternative may be to design multi-agent environments in which road rules emerge as optimal solutions to the problem of maximizing traffic flow. We analyze what ingredients in driving environments cause the emergence of these road rules and find that two crucial factors are noisy perception and agents' spatial density. We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of the emergence of seven social driving behaviors, ranging from obeying traffic signals to following lanes, all of which emerge from training agents to drive quickly to destinations without colliding. Our results add empirical support for the social road rules that countries worldwide have agreed on for safe, efficient driving.
HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving
In the past few decades, autonomous driving algorithms have made significant progress in perception, planning, and control. However, evaluating individual components does not fully reflect the performance of entire systems, highlighting the need for more holistic assessment methods. This motivates the development of HUGSIM, a closed-loop, photo-realistic, and real-time simulator for evaluating autonomous driving algorithms. We achieve this by lifting captured 2D RGB images into the 3D space via 3D Gaussian Splatting, improving the rendering quality for closed-loop scenarios, and building the closed-loop environment. In terms of rendering, We tackle challenges of novel view synthesis in closed-loop scenarios, including viewpoint extrapolation and 360-degree vehicle rendering. Beyond novel view synthesis, HUGSIM further enables the full closed simulation loop, dynamically updating the ego and actor states and observations based on control commands. Moreover, HUGSIM offers a comprehensive benchmark across more than 70 sequences from KITTI-360, Waymo, nuScenes, and PandaSet, along with over 400 varying scenarios, providing a fair and realistic evaluation platform for existing autonomous driving algorithms. HUGSIM not only serves as an intuitive evaluation benchmark but also unlocks the potential for fine-tuning autonomous driving algorithms in a photorealistic closed-loop setting.
UrbanCAD: Towards Highly Controllable and Photorealistic 3D Vehicles for Urban Scene Simulation
Photorealistic 3D vehicle models with high controllability are essential for autonomous driving simulation and data augmentation. While handcrafted CAD models provide flexible controllability, free CAD libraries often lack the high-quality materials necessary for photorealistic rendering. Conversely, reconstructed 3D models offer high-fidelity rendering but lack controllability. In this work, we introduce UrbanCAD, a framework that pushes the frontier of the photorealism-controllability trade-off by generating highly controllable and photorealistic 3D vehicle digital twins from a single urban image and a collection of free 3D CAD models and handcrafted materials. These digital twins enable realistic 360-degree rendering, vehicle insertion, material transfer, relighting, and component manipulation such as opening doors and rolling down windows, supporting the construction of long-tail scenarios. To achieve this, we propose a novel pipeline that operates in a retrieval-optimization manner, adapting to observational data while preserving flexible controllability and fine-grained handcrafted details. Furthermore, given multi-view background perspective and fisheye images, we approximate environment lighting using fisheye images and reconstruct the background with 3DGS, enabling the photorealistic insertion of optimized CAD models into rendered novel view backgrounds. Experimental results demonstrate that UrbanCAD outperforms baselines based on reconstruction and retrieval in terms of photorealism. Additionally, we show that various perception models maintain their accuracy when evaluated on UrbanCAD with in-distribution configurations but degrade when applied to realistic out-of-distribution data generated by our method. This suggests that UrbanCAD is a significant advancement in creating photorealistic, safety-critical driving scenarios for downstream applications.
Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving
In autonomous driving, predicting future events in advance and evaluating the foreseeable risks empowers autonomous vehicles to better plan their actions, enhancing safety and efficiency on the road. To this end, we propose Drive-WM, the first driving world model compatible with existing end-to-end planning models. Through a joint spatial-temporal modeling facilitated by view factorization, our model generates high-fidelity multiview videos in driving scenes. Building on its powerful generation ability, we showcase the potential of applying the world model for safe driving planning for the first time. Particularly, our Drive-WM enables driving into multiple futures based on distinct driving maneuvers, and determines the optimal trajectory according to the image-based rewards. Evaluation on real-world driving datasets verifies that our method could generate high-quality, consistent, and controllable multiview videos, opening up possibilities for real-world simulations and safe planning.
Anything in Any Scene: Photorealistic Video Object Insertion
Realistic video simulation has shown significant potential across diverse applications, from virtual reality to film production. This is particularly true for scenarios where capturing videos in real-world settings is either impractical or expensive. Existing approaches in video simulation often fail to accurately model the lighting environment, represent the object geometry, or achieve high levels of photorealism. In this paper, we propose Anything in Any Scene, a novel and generic framework for realistic video simulation that seamlessly inserts any object into an existing dynamic video with a strong emphasis on physical realism. Our proposed general framework encompasses three key processes: 1) integrating a realistic object into a given scene video with proper placement to ensure geometric realism; 2) estimating the sky and environmental lighting distribution and simulating realistic shadows to enhance the light realism; 3) employing a style transfer network that refines the final video output to maximize photorealism. We experimentally demonstrate that Anything in Any Scene framework produces simulated videos of great geometric realism, lighting realism, and photorealism. By significantly mitigating the challenges associated with video data generation, our framework offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for acquiring high-quality videos. Furthermore, its applications extend well beyond video data augmentation, showing promising potential in virtual reality, video editing, and various other video-centric applications. Please check our project website https://anythinginanyscene.github.io for access to our project code and more high-resolution video results.
SimBEV: A Synthetic Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Driving Data Generation Tool and Dataset
Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception for autonomous driving has garnered significant attention in recent years, in part because BEV representation facilitates the fusion of multi-sensor data. This enables a variety of perception tasks including BEV segmentation, a concise view of the environment that can be used to plan a vehicle's trajectory. However, this representation is not fully supported by existing datasets, and creation of new datasets can be a time-consuming endeavor. To address this problem, in this paper we introduce SimBEV, an extensively configurable and scalable randomized synthetic data generation tool that incorporates information from multiple sources to capture accurate BEV ground truth data, supports a comprehensive array of sensors, and enables a variety of perception tasks including BEV segmentation and 3D object detection. We use SimBEV to create the SimBEV dataset, a large collection of annotated perception data from diverse driving scenarios.
RAD: Training an End-to-End Driving Policy via Large-Scale 3DGS-based Reinforcement Learning
Existing end-to-end autonomous driving (AD) algorithms typically follow the Imitation Learning (IL) paradigm, which faces challenges such as causal confusion and the open-loop gap. In this work, we establish a 3DGS-based closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) training paradigm. By leveraging 3DGS techniques, we construct a photorealistic digital replica of the real physical world, enabling the AD policy to extensively explore the state space and learn to handle out-of-distribution scenarios through large-scale trial and error. To enhance safety, we design specialized rewards that guide the policy to effectively respond to safety-critical events and understand real-world causal relationships. For better alignment with human driving behavior, IL is incorporated into RL training as a regularization term. We introduce a closed-loop evaluation benchmark consisting of diverse, previously unseen 3DGS environments. Compared to IL-based methods, RAD achieves stronger performance in most closed-loop metrics, especially 3x lower collision rate. Abundant closed-loop results are presented at https://hgao-cv.github.io/RAD.
SUTD-TrafficQA: A Question Answering Benchmark and an Efficient Network for Video Reasoning over Traffic Events
Traffic event cognition and reasoning in videos is an important task that has a wide range of applications in intelligent transportation, assisted driving, and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we create a novel dataset, SUTD-TrafficQA (Traffic Question Answering), which takes the form of video QA based on the collected 10,080 in-the-wild videos and annotated 62,535 QA pairs, for benchmarking the cognitive capability of causal inference and event understanding models in complex traffic scenarios. Specifically, we propose 6 challenging reasoning tasks corresponding to various traffic scenarios, so as to evaluate the reasoning capability over different kinds of complex yet practical traffic events. Moreover, we propose Eclipse, a novel Efficient glimpse network via dynamic inference, in order to achieve computation-efficient and reliable video reasoning. The experiments show that our method achieves superior performance while reducing the computation cost significantly. The project page: https://github.com/SUTDCV/SUTD-TrafficQA.
Roto-translated Local Coordinate Frames For Interacting Dynamical Systems
Modelling interactions is critical in learning complex dynamical systems, namely systems of interacting objects with highly non-linear and time-dependent behaviour. A large class of such systems can be formalized as geometric graphs, i.e., graphs with nodes positioned in the Euclidean space given an arbitrarily chosen global coordinate system, for instance vehicles in a traffic scene. Notwithstanding the arbitrary global coordinate system, the governing dynamics of the respective dynamical systems are invariant to rotations and translations, also known as Galilean invariance. As ignoring these invariances leads to worse generalization, in this work we propose local coordinate frames per node-object to induce roto-translation invariance to the geometric graph of the interacting dynamical system. Further, the local coordinate frames allow for a natural definition of anisotropic filtering in graph neural networks. Experiments in traffic scenes, 3D motion capture, and colliding particles demonstrate that the proposed approach comfortably outperforms the recent state-of-the-art.
Imitation Is Not Enough: Robustifying Imitation with Reinforcement Learning for Challenging Driving Scenarios
Imitation learning (IL) is a simple and powerful way to use high-quality human driving data, which can be collected at scale, to identify driving preferences and produce human-like behavior. However, policies based on imitation learning alone often fail to sufficiently account for safety and reliability concerns. In this paper, we show how imitation learning combined with reinforcement learning using simple rewards can substantially improve the safety and reliability of driving policies over those learned from imitation alone. In particular, we use a combination of imitation and reinforcement learning to train a policy on over 100k miles of urban driving data, and measure its effectiveness in test scenarios grouped by different levels of collision risk. To our knowledge, this is the first application of a combined imitation and reinforcement learning approach in autonomous driving that utilizes large amounts of real-world human driving data.
Latency-aware Road Anomaly Segmentation in Videos: A Photorealistic Dataset and New Metrics
In the past several years, road anomaly segmentation is actively explored in the academia and drawing growing attention in the industry. The rationale behind is straightforward: if the autonomous car can brake before hitting an anomalous object, safety is promoted. However, this rationale naturally calls for a temporally informed setting while existing methods and benchmarks are designed in an unrealistic frame-wise manner. To bridge this gap, we contribute the first video anomaly segmentation dataset for autonomous driving. Since placing various anomalous objects on busy roads and annotating them in every frame are dangerous and expensive, we resort to synthetic data. To improve the relevance of this synthetic dataset to real-world applications, we train a generative adversarial network conditioned on rendering G-buffers for photorealism enhancement. Our dataset consists of 120,000 high-resolution frames at a 60 FPS framerate, as recorded in 7 different towns. As an initial benchmarking, we provide baselines using latest supervised and unsupervised road anomaly segmentation methods. Apart from conventional ones, we focus on two new metrics: temporal consistency and latencyaware streaming accuracy. We believe the latter is valuable as it measures whether an anomaly segmentation algorithm can truly prevent a car from crashing in a temporally informed setting.
EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment
Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.
CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator
We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an end-to-end model trained via imitation learning, and an end-to-end model trained via reinforcement learning. The approaches are evaluated in controlled scenarios of increasing difficulty, and their performance is examined via metrics provided by CARLA, illustrating the platform's utility for autonomous driving research. The supplementary video can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Hp8Dz-Zek2E
MTGS: Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting
Multi-traversal data, commonly collected through daily commutes or by self-driving fleets, provides multiple viewpoints for scene reconstruction within a road block. This data offers significant potential for high-quality novel view synthesis, which is crucial for applications such as autonomous vehicle simulators. However, inherent challenges in multi-traversal data often result in suboptimal reconstruction quality, including variations in appearance and the presence of dynamic objects. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting (MTGS), a novel approach that reconstructs high-quality driving scenes from arbitrarily collected multi-traversal data by modeling a shared static geometry while separately handling dynamic elements and appearance variations. Our method employs a multi-traversal dynamic scene graph with a shared static node and traversal-specific dynamic nodes, complemented by color correction nodes with learnable spherical harmonics coefficient residuals. This approach enables high-fidelity novel view synthesis and provides flexibility to navigate any viewpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale driving dataset, nuPlan, with multi-traversal data. Our results demonstrate that MTGS improves LPIPS by 23.5% and geometry accuracy by 46.3% compared to single-traversal baselines. The code and data would be available to the public.
A Survey of Robotic Navigation and Manipulation with Physics Simulators in the Era of Embodied AI
Navigation and manipulation are core capabilities in Embodied AI, yet training agents with these capabilities in the real world faces high costs and time complexity. Therefore, sim-to-real transfer has emerged as a key approach, yet the sim-to-real gap persists. This survey examines how physics simulators address this gap by analyzing their properties overlooked in previous surveys. We also analyze their features for navigation and manipulation tasks, along with hardware requirements. Additionally, we offer a resource with benchmark datasets, metrics, simulation platforms, and cutting-edge methods-such as world models and geometric equivariance-to help researchers select suitable tools while accounting for hardware constraints.
DistillDrive: End-to-End Multi-Mode Autonomous Driving Distillation by Isomorphic Hetero-Source Planning Model
End-to-end autonomous driving has been recently seen rapid development, exerting a profound influence on both industry and academia. However, the existing work places excessive focus on ego-vehicle status as their sole learning objectives and lacks of planning-oriented understanding, which limits the robustness of the overall decision-making prcocess. In this work, we introduce DistillDrive, an end-to-end knowledge distillation-based autonomous driving model that leverages diversified instance imitation to enhance multi-mode motion feature learning. Specifically, we employ a planning model based on structured scene representations as the teacher model, leveraging its diversified planning instances as multi-objective learning targets for the end-to-end model. Moreover, we incorporate reinforcement learning to enhance the optimization of state-to-decision mappings, while utilizing generative modeling to construct planning-oriented instances, fostering intricate interactions within the latent space. We validate our model on the nuScenes and NAVSIM datasets, achieving a 50\% reduction in collision rate and a 3-point improvement in closed-loop performance compared to the baseline model. Code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/YuruiAI/DistillDrive
IncidentResponseGPT: Generating Traffic Incident Response Plans with Generative Artificial Intelligence
The proposed IncidentResponseGPT framework - a novel system that applies generative artificial intelligence (AI) to potentially enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of traffic incident response. This model allows for synthesis of region-specific incident response guidelines and generates incident response plans adapted to specific area, aiming to expedite decision-making for traffic management authorities. This approach aims to accelerate incident resolution times by suggesting various recommendations (e.g. optimal rerouting strategies, estimating resource needs) to minimize the overall impact on the urban traffic network. The system suggests specific actions, including dynamic lane closures, optimized rerouting and dispatching appropriate emergency resources. IncidentResponseGPT employs the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank generated response plans based on criteria like impact minimization and resource efficiency based on their proximity to an human-proposed solution.
GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Directly producing planning results from raw sensors has been a long-desired solution for autonomous driving and has attracted increasing attention recently. Most existing end-to-end autonomous driving methods factorize this problem into perception, motion prediction, and planning. However, we argue that the conventional progressive pipeline still cannot comprehensively model the entire traffic evolution process, e.g., the future interaction between the ego car and other traffic participants and the structural trajectory prior. In this paper, we explore a new paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, where the key is to predict how the ego car and the surroundings evolve given past scenes. We propose GenAD, a generative framework that casts autonomous driving into a generative modeling problem. We propose an instance-centric scene tokenizer that first transforms the surrounding scenes into map-aware instance tokens. We then employ a variational autoencoder to learn the future trajectory distribution in a structural latent space for trajectory prior modeling. We further adopt a temporal model to capture the agent and ego movements in the latent space to generate more effective future trajectories. GenAD finally simultaneously performs motion prediction and planning by sampling distributions in the learned structural latent space conditioned on the instance tokens and using the learned temporal model to generate futures. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes benchmark show that the proposed GenAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on vision-centric end-to-end autonomous driving with high efficiency. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/GenAD.
ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Although end-to-end autonomous driving has made remarkable progress, its performance degrades significantly in rare and long-tail scenarios. Recent approaches attempt to address this challenge by leveraging the rich world knowledge of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but these methods suffer from several limitations: (1) a significant domain gap between the pre-training data of VLMs and real-world driving data, (2) a dimensionality mismatch between the discrete language space and the continuous action space, and (3) imitation learning tends to capture the average behavior present in the dataset, which may be suboptimal even dangerous. In this paper, we propose ReCogDrive, an autonomous driving system that integrates VLMs with diffusion planner, which adopts a three-stage paradigm for training. In the first stage, we use a large-scale driving question-answering datasets to train the VLMs, mitigating the domain discrepancy between generic content and real-world driving scenarios. In the second stage, we employ a diffusion-based planner to perform imitation learning, mapping representations from the latent language space to continuous driving actions. Finally, we fine-tune the diffusion planner using reinforcement learning with NAVSIM non-reactive simulator, enabling the model to generate safer, more human-like driving trajectories. We evaluate our approach on the planning-oriented NAVSIM benchmark, achieving a PDMS of 89.6 and setting a new state-of-the-art that surpasses the previous vision-only SOTA by 5.6 PDMS.
The OPNV Data Collection: A Dataset for Infrastructure-Supported Perception Research with Focus on Public Transportation
This paper we present our vision and ongoing work for a novel dataset designed to advance research into the interoperability of intelligent vehicles and infrastructure, specifically aimed at enhancing cooperative perception and interaction in the realm of public transportation. Unlike conventional datasets centered on ego-vehicle data, this approach encompasses both a stationary sensor tower and a moving vehicle, each equipped with cameras, LiDARs, and GNSS, while the vehicle additionally includes an inertial navigation system. Our setup features comprehensive calibration and time synchronization, ensuring seamless and accurate sensor data fusion crucial for studying complex, dynamic scenes. Emphasizing public transportation, the dataset targets to include scenes like bus station maneuvers and driving on dedicated bus lanes, reflecting the specifics of small public buses. We introduce the open-source ".4mse" file format for the new dataset, accompanied by a research kit. This kit provides tools such as ego-motion compensation or LiDAR-to-camera projection enabling advanced research on intelligent vehicle-infrastructure integration. Our approach does not include annotations; however, we plan to implement automatically generated labels sourced from state-of-the-art public repositories. Several aspects are still up for discussion, and timely feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated. A sneak preview on one data frame will be available at a Google Colab Notebook. Moreover, we will use the related GitHub Repository to collect remarks and suggestions.
Spatio-Temporal Lattice Planning Using Optimal Motion Primitives
Lattice-based planning techniques simplify the motion planning problem for autonomous vehicles by limiting available motions to a pre-computed set of primitives. These primitives are then combined online to generate more complex maneuvers. A set of motion primitives t-span a lattice if, given a real number t at least 1, any configuration in the lattice can be reached via a sequence of motion primitives whose cost is no more than a factor of t from optimal. Computing a minimal t-spanning set balances a trade-off between computed motion quality and motion planning performance. In this work, we formulate this problem for an arbitrary lattice as a mixed integer linear program. We also propose an A*-based algorithm to solve the motion planning problem using these primitives. Finally, we present an algorithm that removes the excessive oscillations from planned motions -- a common problem in lattice-based planning. Our method is validated for autonomous driving in both parking lot and highway scenarios.
TrafficMOT: A Challenging Dataset for Multi-Object Tracking in Complex Traffic Scenarios
Multi-object tracking in traffic videos is a crucial research area, offering immense potential for enhancing traffic monitoring accuracy and promoting road safety measures through the utilisation of advanced machine learning algorithms. However, existing datasets for multi-object tracking in traffic videos often feature limited instances or focus on single classes, which cannot well simulate the challenges encountered in complex traffic scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce TrafficMOT, an extensive dataset designed to encompass diverse traffic situations with complex scenarios. To validate the complexity and challenges presented by TrafficMOT, we conducted comprehensive empirical studies using three different settings: fully-supervised, semi-supervised, and a recent powerful zero-shot foundation model Tracking Anything Model (TAM). The experimental results highlight the inherent complexity of this dataset, emphasising its value in driving advancements in the field of traffic monitoring and multi-object tracking.
