mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Scalable End-to-End Autonomous Vehicle Testing via Rare-event Simulation

arXiv 1811.00145 ↗First posted 31 Oct 2018cs.LG cs.RO stat.MLcited by 76

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Cited by 20 in End-to-end autonomous driving, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

While recent developments in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology highlight substantial progress, we lack tools for rigorous and scalable testing. Real-world testing, the textitde facto evaluation environment, places the public in danger, and, due to the rare nature of accidents, will require billions of miles in order to statistically validate performance claims. We implement a simulation framework that can test an entire modern autonomous driving system, including, in particular, systems that employ deep-learning perception and control algorithms. Using adaptive importance-sampling methods to accelerate rare-event probability evaluation, we estimate the probability of an accident under a base distribution governing standard traffic behavior. We demonstrate our framework on a highway scenario, accelerating system evaluation by 2-20 times over naive Monte Carlo sampling methods and 10-300 mathsfP times (where mathsfP is the number of processors) over real-world testing.

Key facts. Cited by 76 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2018.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 23; 2022: 13; 2023: 13; 2024: 12; 2025: 9; 2026: 6.

76 papers.

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  1. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontierscited by 485
  2. 2021Generating Useful Accident-Prone Driving Scenarios via a Learned Traffic Priorcited by 136
  3. 2021AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehiclescited by 132
  4. 2022KING: Generating Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios for Robust Imitation via Kinematics Gradientscited by 95
  5. 2022SafeBench: A Benchmarking Platform for Safety Evaluation of Autonomous Vehiclescited by 65
  6. 2023Synthetic Datasets for Autonomous Driving: A Surveycited by 48
  7. 2022Hierarchical Model-Based Imitation Learning for Planning in Autonomous Drivingcited by 43
  8. 2024WcDT: World-centric Diffusion Transformer for Traffic Scene Generationcited by 31
  9. 2021Provably Efficient Black-Box Action Poisoning Attacks Against Reinforcement Learningcited by 29
  10. 2023Towards Knowledge-driven Autonomous Drivingcited by 29
  11. 2022V2XP-ASG: Generating Adversarial Scenes for Vehicle-to-Everything Perceptioncited by 28
  12. 2021Corner Case Generation and Analysis for Safety Assessment of Autonomous Vehiclescited by 27
38 more
  1. 2022TrajGen: Generating Realistic and Diverse Trajectories with Reactive and Feasible Agent Behaviors for Autonomous Drivingcited by 23
  2. 2021Generating and Characterizing Scenarios for Safety Testing of Autonomous Vehiclescited by 21
  3. 2021A Survey on Scenario-Based Testing for Automated Driving Systems in High-Fidelity Simulationcited by 21
  4. 2021CausalAF: Causal Autoregressive Flow for Safety-Critical Driving Scenario Generationcited by 20
  5. 2021Neural Network Guided Evolutionary Fuzzing for Finding Traffic Violations of Autonomous Vehiclescited by 19
  6. 2024Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Training with Language Model Integration and Critical Scenario Generationcited by 19
  7. 2021Gym-ANM: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Active Network Management Tasks in Electricity Distribution Systemscited by 18
  8. 2023Safety-Critical Scenario Generation Via Reinforcement Learning Based Editingcited by 16
  9. 2025Reliable and Scalable Robot Policy Evaluation with Imperfect Simulatorscited by 13
  10. 2021Finding Critical Scenarios for Automated Driving Systems: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 12
  11. 2022RAP: Risk-Aware Prediction for Robust Planningcited by 12
  12. 2024Learning to Drive via Asymmetric Self-Playcited by 11
  13. 2022LEADER: Learning Attention over Driving Behaviors for Planning under Uncertaintycited by 9
  14. 2024Black Swan: Abductive and Defeasible Video Reasoning in Unpredictable Eventscited by 9
  15. 2021Detecting Multi-Sensor Fusion Errors in Advanced Driver-Assistance Systemscited by 8
  16. 2022Improving Adversarial Robustness by Contrastive Guided Diffusion Processcited by 8
  17. 2022Testing Rare Downstream Safety Violations via Upstream Adaptive Sampling of Perception Error Modelscited by 7
  18. 2021Achieving Efficiency in Black Box Simulation of Distribution Tails with Self-structuring Importance Samplerscited by 6
  19. 2021Gym-ANM: Open-source software to leverage reinforcement learning for power system management in research and educationcited by 6
  20. 2023(Re)2H2O: Autonomous Driving Scenario Generation via Reversely Regularized Hybrid Offline-and-Online Reinforcement Learningcited by 6
  21. 2024Diffusion-Based Failure Sampling for Evaluating Safety-Critical Autonomous Systemscited by 6
  22. 2025Is Single-View Mesh Reconstruction Ready for Robotics?cited by 6
  23. 2021Neural-to-Tree Policy Distillation with Policy Improvement Criterioncited by 5
  24. 2021Assisted Robust Reward Designcited by 5
  25. 2025Simulating the Unseen: Crash Prediction Must Learn from What Did Not Happencited by 5
  26. 2025Calibrating Generative Models to Distributional Constraintscited by 5
  27. 2022Risk-Aware Scene Sampling for Dynamic Assurance of Autonomous Systemscited by 4
  28. 2022Self-Improving Safety Performance of Reinforcement Learning Based Driving with Black-Box Verification Algorithmscited by 4
  29. 2023Adaptive Failure Search Using Critical States from Domain Expertscited by 4
  30. 2021I Know You Can't See Me: Dynamic Occlusion-Aware Safety Validation of Strategic Planners for Autonomous Vehicles Using Hypergamescited by 3
  31. 2021Certifiable Deep Importance Sampling for Rare-Event Simulation of Black-Box Systemscited by 3
  32. 2021Querying Labelled Data with Scenario Programs for Sim-to-Real Validationcited by 3
  33. 2022Causal Scene BERT: Improving object detection by searching for challenging groups of datacited by 3
  34. 2023Model-based Validation as Probabilistic Inferencecited by 3
  35. 2023Stackelberg Driver Model for Continual Policy Improvement in Scenario-Based Closed-Loop Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
  36. 2024Importance Sampling-Guided Meta-Training for Intelligent Agents in Highly Interactive Environmentscited by 3
  37. 2021Scalable Safety-Critical Policy Evaluation with Accelerated Rare Event Samplingcited by 2
  38. 2021Probabilistic Metamodels for an Efficient Characterization of Complex Driving Scenarioscited by 2

50 most cited of 76 All 76 (JSON)