Generating Realistic Safety-Critical Scenarios for Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a three-stage framework combining real-world data and adaptive simulation to generate realistic safety-critical vehicle-pedestrian interaction scenarios for autonomous driving validation.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning approach that produces high-fidelity, realistic safety-critical scenarios at scale, validated through extensive experiments and a new dataset.

Findings

Refined MA-SST-DDPG outperforms baselines in realistic evasive behaviors.

Generated data statistically matches real-world interaction distributions.

A Turing test confirmed indistinguishability of simulated behaviors from real interactions.

Abstract

Automated driving system deployment requires rigorous validation across safety-critical vehicle-pedestrian interactions, yet real-world datasets rarely capture high-risk scenarios while simulation platforms lack realistic behavior. In response, this study proposes a three-stage framework that combines real-world grounding with adaptive simulation to generate behaviorally realistic safety-critical scenarios at scale. Stage 1 pre-trains multi-agent state-space Transformer-enhanced DDPG (MA-SST-DDPG) agents on real-world safety-critical data to learn human-like interactive evasive behaviors through data-driven learning. Stage 2 deploys pre-trained multi-agents in CARLA for online reinforcement learning to generalize across diverse scenarios, integrating real-world knowledge with simulation experience to produce a refined MA-SST-DDPG model. Stage 3 uses CARLA with the refined model to generate over 198,000 high-resolution interaction episodes from eight intersection scenarios, culminating in the Vehicle-Pedestrian Safety-Critical Interaction (VPSCI) dataset. The Refined MA-SST-DDPG model outperformed baseline methods in reproducing realistic evasive behaviors, achieving the lowest trajectory errors (ADE = 0.072 m, FDE = 0.142 m). Statistical comparison confirmed distributional equivalence between the generated and real-world data in both conflict severity and behavioral response. A Turing test confirmed that the three-stage framework generated evasive behaviors were indistinguishable from real-world interactions. These results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in producing high-fidelity safety-critical data, offering valuable sources for the development of ADS and simulation-based safety evaluations.