The Adaptive Stress Testing Formulation
This work addresses the validation problem for autonomous systems, presenting a novel formulation that could improve safety testing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of validating safe autonomy by introducing the theory of adaptive stress testing (AST), a black-box approach designed to find failures tractably without oversimplifying simulations.
Validation is a key challenge in the search for safe autonomy. Simulations are often either too simple to provide robust validation, or too complex to tractably compute. Therefore, approximate validation methods are needed to tractably find failures without unsafe simplifications. This paper presents the theory behind one such black-box approach: adaptive stress testing (AST). We also provide three examples of validation problems formulated to work with AST.