SceneFactory-3D: Lifting 2D Traffic Scenes into 3D Physical Counterfactuals for Scalable Physically Grounded Safety Evaluation

Autonomous-driving simulators typically trade physical fidelity for scalable parallelism. Physics-based platforms such as CARLA and MetaDrive provide articulated vehicle dynamics and contact, but their non-vectorized interfaces make batched training difficult. GPU-batched systems such as Waymax and GPUDrive scale to hundreds of scenarios by replacing rigid-body physics with simplified kinematic models, omitting tire--road interaction, suspension, contact dynamics, and road-condition-dependent friction. We introduce SceneFactory, a GPU-vectorized platform for procedural scene construction, physics-based multi-agent simulation, and RL in autonomous-driving environments. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim + Isaac Lab, SceneFactory represents worlds and agents as batched tensors: control, observations, rewards, resets, and policy inference run as GPU tensor operations over the Isaac Lab tensor API. SceneFactory converts Waymo Open Motion Dataset road topologies into simulation-ready USD worlds, runs many worlds concurrently on one GPU, populates each with multiple articulated PhysX vehicles, and maps precipitation and road-surface type to PhysX material friction coefficients. With GPU vectorization, SceneFactory achieves up to 127$\times$ higher throughput than a non-vectorized PhysX baseline on the same GPU and physics solver, reaching 19,250 controlled-agent simulation steps per second at 256 worlds $\times$ 16 agents. Cross-simulator transfer reveals an asymmetric dynamics gap: physics-grounded RL policies transfer to a simplified kinematic bicycle model with 99.5% success, whereas reverse transfer drops to 47.3%. Under wet-road friction, friction-aware policies reduce mean peak DRAC from 58.7 to 27.8,m/s$^2$ without sacrificing goal reach. SceneFactory shows that scalable autonomous-driving training need not discard articulated rigid-body dynamics or physically grounded road-condition variation.

Road geometry (e.g., crests, sags, and speed humps) and surface conditions (e.g., wet or icy pavement) affect how vehicles move, what drivers and onboard cameras observe, and how much clearance remains between vehicles. Editing these properties in a driving scene therefore requires corresponding changes in vehicle motion. Capturing these differences in a driving video requires a road edit to propagate to vehicle motion, camera viewpoint, and the clearance between vehicles. We present TerrainForge, a framework for generating road geometry-focused counterfactuals from reconstructed multi-vehicle driving episodes. A unified road model connects scene deformation with four-wheel vehicle dynamics, allowing crests, sags, speed humps, and friction changes to propagate through vehicle motion, camera viewpoint, and inter-vehicle clearance. Vehicle dynamics are evaluated against CarSim, and prescribed road geometry is verified in reconstructed Waymo scenes. Across 18 episodes, leaving surrounding vehicles on their recorded trajectories instead of recomputing their responses produces median peak differences in predicted ego-lead distance of 1.52 m for crests and 1.41 m for sags. We further simulate the ego response to 15,758 road edits across 983 braking episodes, pairing each edit with its safety outcomes relative to an unedited replay. These pairs train a first-stage screening surrogate that takes the original driving context and candidate road-edit parameters as input and predicts the resulting change in the ego's terminal gap. On held-out scenes, this prediction achieves 22-40% lower mean absolute error than predicting no change, so candidates can be screened cheaply before the full multi-vehicle rollout.

We introduce ScenarioControl, the first vision-language control mechanism for learned driving scenario generation. Given a text prompt or an input image, Scenario-Control synthesizes diverse, realistic 3D scenario rollouts - including map, 3D boxes of reactive actors over time, pedestrians, driving infrastructure, and ego camera observations. The method generates scenes in a vectorized latent space that represents road structure and dynamic agents jointly. To connect multimodal control with sparse vectorized scene elements, we propose a cross-global control mechanism that integrates crossattention with a lightweight global-context branch, enabling fine-grained control over road layout and traffic conditions while preserving realism. The method produces temporally consistent scenario rollouts from the perspectives different actors in the scene, supporting long-horizon continuation of driving scenarios. To facilitate training and evaluation, we release a dataset with text annotations aligned to vectorized map structures. Extensive experiments validate that the control adherence and fidelity of ScenarioControl compare favorable to all tested methods across all experiments. Project webpage: https://light.princeton.edu/ScenarioControl