How corner is a corner case? Percentile control for highway scenario generation

Title:How corner is a corner case? Percentile control for highway scenario generation

Abstract:Generating corner-case scenarios with appropriate adversity in a simulation environment is critical for testing an autonomous vehicle (AV) software stack's safety performance before deployment. Existing autonomous-driving scenario generators can enforce specific behavior, adversity, or feasibility conditions, but they provide limited control over how extreme a generated scenario is relative to plausible futures in the same traffic context. This study represents the adversity of a generated scenario as its percentile in the conditional distribution of future risk given the observed history. This view supports calibrated answers to two questions: how "corner" a generated corner-case scenario is and how its "cornerness" can be fine-tuned. To this end, we formulate history-conditioned risk-percentile requests and learn a reference risk distribution that maps each requested percentile to a physical risk target. We then use a percentile-conditioned joint diffusion model with sampling-time risk guidance to generate multi-agent futures, together with a reference-based criterion for evaluating percentile realization. Experiments use the minimum post-encroachment time (PET) between the ego and its surrounding vehicles as the risk surrogate on highD. On the primary evaluation set, our method realizes 1,422 of 1,440 requests within a 0.05 percentile tolerance (98.75%), with mean percentile error 0.00673 and PET-target error 0.00991 seconds. The resulting interface connects context-relative risk specification, physical realization, and evaluation through a common risk scale. Project website and videos of generated scenarios are available at this https URL.

30 pages, 13 figures, 8 tables. Project page with videos: this https URL Code: this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.05003 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.05003v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.05003 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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