mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

On a Formal Model of Safe and Scalable Self-driving Cars

arXiv 1708.06374 ↗First posted 21 Aug 2017cs.RO cs.AI stat.MLcited by 129

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 49 in End-to-end autonomous driving, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, car makers and tech companies have been racing towards self driving cars. It seems that the main parameter in this race is who will have the first car on the road. The goal of this paper is to add to the equation two additional crucial parameters. The first is standardization of safety assurance --- what are the minimal requirements that every self-driving car must satisfy, and how can we verify these requirements. The second parameter is scalability --- engineering solutions that lead to unleashed costs will not scale to millions of cars, which will push interest in this field into a niche academic corner, and drive the entire field into a "winter of autonomous driving". In the first part of the paper we propose a white-box, interpretable, mathematical model for safety assurance, which we call Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS). In the second part we describe a design of a system that adheres to our safety assurance requirements and is scalable to millions of cars.

Key facts. Cited by 129 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2017.

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Citing papers per year: 2018: 1; 2019: 2; 2020: 0; 2021: 23; 2022: 16; 2023: 21; 2024: 16; 2025: 20; 2026: 30.

129 papers.

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  1. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontierscited by 485
  2. 2018Scalable agent alignment via reward modeling: a research directioncited by 438
  3. 2021Software Engineering for AI-Based Systems: A Surveycited by 68
  4. 2021SafetyNet: Safe planning for real-world self-driving vehicles using machine-learned policiescited by 68
  5. 2021A Survey of Deep RL and IL for Autonomous Driving Policy Learningcited by 59
  6. 2023LaMPilot: An Open Benchmark Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Language Model Programscited by 45
  7. 2025Centaur: Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Test-Time Trainingcited by 41
  8. 2019Driving with Style: Inverse Reinforcement Learning in General-Purpose Planning for Automated Drivingcited by 30
  9. 2021Spatio-Temporal Scene-Graph Embedding for Autonomous Vehicle Collision Predictioncited by 29
  10. 2023The Integration of Prediction and Planning in Deep Learning Automated Driving Systems: A Reviewcited by 29
  11. 2021Corner Case Generation and Analysis for Safety Assessment of Autonomous Vehiclescited by 27
  12. 2021A Survey on Scenario-Based Testing for Automated Driving Systems in High-Fidelity Simulationcited by 21
38 more
  1. 2022Transferable and Adaptable Driving Behavior Predictioncited by 20
  2. 2024A Review of Reward Functions for Reinforcement Learning in the context of Autonomous Drivingcited by 17
  3. 2022Transferring Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Policies for Autonomous Driving using Sim-to-Realcited by 16
  4. 2024Human-centric Reward Optimization for Reinforcement Learning-based Automated Driving using Large Language Modelscited by 14
  5. 2025Generative Models in Decision Making: A Surveycited by 14
  6. 2023Dynamically Conservative Self-Driving Planner for Long-Tail Casescited by 13
  7. 2021The Reasonable Crowd: Towards evidence-based and interpretable models of driving behaviorcited by 12
  8. 2021Finding Critical Scenarios for Automated Driving Systems: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 12
  9. 2025A Survey of Safe Reinforcement Learning and Constrained MDPs: A Technical Survey on Single-Agent and Multi-Agent Safetycited by 12
  10. 2022Task-Relevant Failure Detection for Trajectory Predictors in Autonomous Vehiclescited by 11
  11. 2024SafeDrive: Knowledge- and Data-Driven Risk-Sensitive Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles with Large Language Modelscited by 10
  12. 2021A Review of Testing Object-Based Environment Perception for Safe Automated Drivingcited by 9
  13. 2021Hierarchical Program-Triggered Reinforcement Learning Agents For Automated Drivingcited by 9
  14. 2023Deception Game: Closing the Safety-Learning Loop in Interactive Robot Autonomycited by 9
  15. 2021Safety of the Intended Driving Behavior Using Rulebookscited by 8
  16. 2022Scenario-Assisted Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 8
  17. 2023Towards Safe Autonomous Driving Policies using a Neuro-Symbolic Deep Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 7
  18. 2022Testing predictive automated driving systems: lessons learned and future recommendationscited by 6
  19. 2022Monitoring of Perception Systems: Deterministic, Probabilistic, and Learning-based Fault Detection and Identificationcited by 6
  20. 2023Identify, Estimate and Bound the Uncertainty of Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 6
  21. 2023Towards Long-Range 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Vehiclescited by 5
  22. 2023Testing learning-enabled cyber-physical systems with Large-Language Models: A Formal Approachcited by 5
  23. 2025NeuroStrata: Harnessing Neurosymbolic Paradigms for Improved Design, Testability, and Verifiability of Autonomous CPScited by 5
  24. 2025A Framework for a Capability-driven Evaluation of Scenario Understanding for Multimodal Large Language Models in Autonomous Drivingcited by 5
  25. 2026Causal Scene Narration with Runtime Safety Supervision for Vision-Language-Action Drivingcited by 5
  26. 2021Roadmap on Signal Processing for Next Generation Measurement Systemscited by 4
  27. 2021Intersection focused Situation Coverage-based Verification and Validation Framework for Autonomous Vehicles Implemented in CARLAcited by 4
  28. 2023PEM: Perception Error Model for Virtual Testing of Autonomous Vehiclescited by 4
  29. 2023Adaptive Failure Search Using Critical States from Domain Expertscited by 4
  30. 2024LSM: A Comprehensive Metric for Assessing the Safety of Lane Detection Systems in Autonomous Drivingcited by 4
  31. 2025A Comprehensive Safety Metric to Evaluate Perception in Autonomous Systemscited by 4
  32. 2021Safety Case Templates for Autonomous Systemscited by 3
  33. 2021Algorithmic Ethics: Formalization and Verification of Autonomous Vehicle Obligationscited by 3
  34. 2022Setting AI in context: A case study on defining the context and operational design domain for automated drivingcited by 3
  35. 2022Zhuyi: Perception Processing Rate Estimation for Safety in Autonomous Vehiclescited by 3
  36. 2023Measuring Value Alignmentcited by 3
  37. 2024Data-Driven Permissible Safe Control with Barrier Certificatescited by 3
  38. 2021Towards Data-Driven Synthesis of Autonomous Vehicle Safety Conceptscited by 2

50 most cited of 129 All 129 (JSON)