Importance Sampling and PCA for Finding Failures in Commercial Autonomous Vehicles
Authors: Hailey Warner, Duncan Eddy, Shreya Parjan, Caroline Cahilly, Harrison Delecki, Matthias Kleinstauber, Chaitanya Shinde, Jerry Lopez, +1 more
Abstract
Methods for discovering rare failures in autonomous systems have so far been demonstrated almost exclusively in simulations with simple, academic driving stacks, leaving open whether they generalize to the more robust planners used in commercial systems. We address this gap by applying two rare-event discovery algorithms to a commercial autonomous trucking stack. Adaptive stress testing (AST) uses reinforcement learning to search for the most likely noise trajectories leading to a simulated collision, while diffusion-based failure sampling (DiFS) trains a denoising diffusion model to sample a diverse set of failures. We show that both algorithms find simulated collisions during merge and cut-in maneuvers where traditional Monte Carlo simulation does not. To make these failures actionable, we introduce a statistical analysis based on principal component analysis (PCA) that classifies failures into common modes and identifies the timesteps that most influence the outcome. We cluster the principal components and invert the PCA transform to recover generalized noise trajectories, and show that these trajectories reproduce failures in identical and similar scenarios. This provides a path from failure discovery to systematic diagnosis of perception-level flaws.
Simulation-based testing of autonomous driving systems (ADS) must uncover realistic and diverse failures in dense, heterogeneous traffic. However, existing search-based seeding methods (e.g., genetic algorithms) struggle in high-dimensional spaces, often collapsing to limited modes and missing many failure scenarios. We present PtoP, a framework that combines adaptive random seed generation with Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to produce diverse, failure-inducing initial conditions. SVGD balances attraction toward high-risk regions and repulsion among particles, yielding risk-seeking yet well-distributed seeds across multiple failure modes. PtoP is plug-and-play and enhances existing online testing methods (e.g., reinforcement learning--based testers) by providing principled seeds. Evaluation in CARLA on two industry-grade ADS (Apollo, Autoware) and a native end-to-end system shows that PtoP improves safety violation rate (up to 27.68%), scenario diversity (9.6%), and map coverage (16.78%) over baselines.
To ensure safe on-road behavior, pre-deployment testing and failure discovery of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) is crucial. Present day simulation based testing methods focus largely on mathematical models for efficient search of optimal scenarios, assuming a fixed scenario representation. On the other hand, real-world testing involves substantial manual effort to design scenario templates for testing. These templates represent distinct failure scenarios consisting of pre-deployment vehicle movements, map types, etc. Historical failure records for ADS are a reliable source of real-world failure conditions, which can be used for scenario generation. In this work, we propose a scenario generation pipeline using categorical and contextual information available from historical records in natural language format. Our approach consists of modular LLM based synthetic scenario generation, compatible with the testing constraints of a given system. We successfully apply our method to generate a diverse set of scenarios for testing autonomous navigation on Metadrive simulator using the NHTSA ADS crash records. Our approach results in accurate and diverse scenario generation with a combination of 4 road types, 3 non ego vehicle movement types, including on road anomalies in the form of working zones. Generated scenarios align with the provided testing conditions, and reveals interesting failures of the system within a limited testing budget of 20 scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/anjaliParashar/crash2scenario.
Scenario-based testing with driving simulators is extensively used to identify failing conditions of automated driving assistance systems (ADAS). However, existing studies have shown that repeated test execution in the same as well as in distinct simulators can yield different outcomes, which can be attributed to sources of flakiness or different implementations of the physics. In this paper, we present MultiSim, a novel approach to multi-simulation ADAS testing based on a search-based testing approach that leverages an ensemble of simulators to identify failure-inducing, simulator-agnostic test scenarios. During the search, each scenario is evaluated jointly on multiple simulators. Scenarios that produce consistent results across simulators are prioritized for further exploration, while those that fail on only a subset of simulators are given less priority, as they may reflect simulator-specific issues rather than generalizable failures. Our empirical study, which involves testing three lane-keeping ADAS on different pairs of three widely used simulators, demonstrates that MultiSim outperforms single-simulator testing by achieving, on average, a higher rate of simulator-agnostic failures by 66%. Compared to a state-of-the-art multi-simulator approach that combines the outcome of independent test generation campaigns obtained in different simulators, MultiSim identifies, on average, up to 3.4X more simulator-agnostic failing tests and higher failure rates. To avoid the costly execution of test inputs on which simulators disagree, we propose to predict simulator disagreements and bypass test executions. Our results show that utilizing a surrogate model during the search retains the average number of valid failures and also improves efficiency. Our findings indicate that combining an ensemble of simulators is a promising approach for the automated cross-replication in ADAS testing.