Adversarial and Reactive Traffic Agents for Realistic Driving Simulation

Despite advancements in perception and planning for autonomous vehicles (AVs), validating their performance remains a significant challenge. The deployment of planning algorithms in real-world environments is often ineffective due to discrepancies between simulations and real traffic conditions. Evaluating AVs planning algorithms in simulation typically involves replaying driving logs from recorded real-world traffic. However, agents replayed from offline data are not reactive, lack the ability to respond to arbitrary AV behavior, and cannot behave in an adversarial manner to test certain properties of the driving policy. Therefore, simulation with realistic and potentially adversarial agents represents a critical task for AV planning software validation. In this work, we aim to review current research efforts in the field of adversarial and reactive traffic agents, with a particular focus on the application of classical and adversarial learning-based techniques. The objective of this work is to categorize existing approaches based on the proposed scenario controllability, defined by the number of reactive or adversarial agents. Moreover, we examine existing traffic simulations with respect to their employed default traffic agents and potential extensions, collate datasets that provide initial driving data, and collect relevant evaluation metrics.

Behavior Forests: Real-Time Discovery of Dynamic Behavior for Data Selection

Automated Driving Systems (ADS) development relies on utilizing real-world vehicle data. The volume of data generated by modern vehicles presents transmission, storage, and computational challenges. Focusing on Dynamic Behavior (DB) offers a promising approach to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information for ADS functionalities, thereby reducing data. Time series pattern recognition is beneficial for this task as it can analyze the temporal context of vehicle driving behavior. However, existing state-of-the-art methods often lack the adaptability to identify variable-length patterns or provide analytical descriptions of discovered patterns. This contribution proposes a Behavior Forest framework for real-time data selection by constructing a Behavior Graph during vehicle operation, facilitating analytical descriptions without pre-training. The method demonstrates its performance using a synthetically generated and electrocardiogram data set. An automotive time series data set is used to evaluate the data reduction capabilities, in which this method discarded 96.01% of the incoming data stream, while relevant DB remain included.