Generating Traffic Scenarios via In-Context Learning to Learn Better Motion Planner
This addresses the high cost and limited coverage of manually curated datasets for autonomous driving motion planners, offering an incremental improvement in data generation efficiency.
The paper tackles the problem of generating diverse critical traffic scenarios for training motion planners in autonomous driving, proposing a method that uses large language models with in-context learning to create synthetic data from text descriptions, and shows that motion planners trained with this data significantly outperform those trained only on real-world data.
Motion planning is a crucial component in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art motion planners are trained on meticulously curated datasets, which are not only expensive to annotate but also insufficient in capturing rarely seen critical scenarios. Failing to account for such scenarios poses a significant risk to motion planners and may lead to incidents during testing. An intuitive solution is to manually compose such scenarios by programming and executing a simulator (e.g., CARLA). However, this approach incurs substantial human costs. Motivated by this, we propose an inexpensive method for generating diverse critical traffic scenarios to train more robust motion planners. First, we represent traffic scenarios as scripts, which are then used by the simulator to generate traffic scenarios. Next, we develop a method that accepts user-specified text descriptions, which a Large Language Model translates into scripts using in-context learning. The output scripts are sent to the simulator that produces the corresponding traffic scenarios. As our method can generate abundant safety-critical traffic scenarios, we use them as synthetic training data for motion planners. To demonstrate the value of generated scenarios, we train existing motion planners on our synthetic data, real-world datasets, and a combination of both. Our experiments show that motion planners trained with our data significantly outperform those trained solely on real-world data, showing the usefulness of our synthetic data and the effectiveness of our data generation method. Our source code is available at https://ezharjan.github.io/AutoSceneGen.