Controllable Collision Scenario Generation via Collision Pattern Prediction
This work addresses the need for safer and more efficient testing of autonomous vehicles by enabling automated generation of specific collision types and timings, though it is incremental in building on existing simulation-based methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating diverse, safety-critical collision scenarios for autonomous vehicle evaluation by introducing a controllable collision scenario generation task, achieving higher collision rates and controllability than baselines and using generated scenarios to improve planner robustness.
Evaluating the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) requires diverse, safety-critical scenarios, with collisions being especially important yet rare and unsafe to collect in the real world. Therefore, the community has been focusing on generating safety-critical scenarios in simulation. However, controlling attributes such as collision type and time-to-accident (TTA) remains challenging. We introduce a new task called controllable collision scenario generation, where the goal is to produce trajectories that realize a user-specified collision type and TTA, to investigate the feasibility of automatically generating desired collision scenarios. To support this task, we present COLLIDE, a large-scale collision scenario dataset constructed by transforming real-world driving logs into diverse collisions, balanced across five representative collision types and different TTA intervals. We propose a framework that predicts Collision Pattern, a compact and interpretable representation that captures the spatial configuration of the ego and the adversarial vehicles at impact, before rolling out full adversarial trajectories. Experiments show that our approach outperforms strong baselines in both collision rate and controllability. Furthermore, generated scenarios consistently induce higher planner failure rates, revealing limitations of existing planners. We demonstrate that these scenarios fine-tune planners for robustness improvements, contributing to safer AV deployment in different collision scenarios. Project page is available at https://submit-user.github.io/anon2025