HABIT: Human Action Benchmark for Interactive Traffic in CARLA

TL;DR

HABIT introduces a high-fidelity, real-world human motion benchmark integrated into CARLA to evaluate autonomous driving agents' robustness against complex pedestrian interactions.

Contribution

We developed HABIT, a novel benchmark that incorporates realistic human motions into CARLA, revealing safety issues in state-of-the-art autonomous driving systems that are not evident in traditional scripted tests.

Findings

HABIT exposes safety failures in current AD agents not seen in scripted scenarios.

Autonomous agents show increased collisions and injuries on HABIT compared to standard benchmarks.

Agents often brake unnecessarily, indicating overcautious or misjudged pedestrian interactions.

Abstract

Current autonomous driving (AD) simulations are critically limited by their inadequate representation of realistic and diverse human behavior, which is essential for ensuring safety and reliability. Existing benchmarks often simplify pedestrian interactions, failing to capture complex, dynamic intentions and varied responses critical for robust system deployment. To overcome this, we introduce HABIT (Human Action Benchmark for Interactive Traffic), a high-fidelity simulation benchmark. HABIT integrates real-world human motion, sourced from mocap and videos, into CARLA (Car Learning to Act, a full autonomous driving simulator) via a modular, extensible, and physically consistent motion retargeting pipeline. From an initial pool of approximately 30,000 retargeted motions, we curate 4,730 traffic-compatible pedestrian motions, standardized in SMPL format for physically consistent trajectories. HABIT seamlessly integrates with CARLA's Leaderboard, enabling automated scenario generation and rigorous agent evaluation. Our safety metrics, including Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) and False Positive Braking Rate (FPBR), reveal critical failure modes in state-of-the-art AD agents missed by prior evaluations. Evaluating three state-of-the-art autonomous driving agents, InterFuser, TransFuser, and BEVDriver, demonstrates how HABIT exposes planner weaknesses that remain hidden in scripted simulations. Despite achieving close or equal to zero collisions per kilometer on the CARLA Leaderboard, the autonomous agents perform notably worse on HABIT, with up to 7.43 collisions/km and a 12.94% AIS 3+ injury risk, and they brake unnecessarily in up to 33% of cases. All components are publicly released to support reproducible, pedestrian-aware AI research.