# KING: Generating Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios for Robust Imitation via Kinematics Gradients

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13683 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13683/

## Key facts

- Cited by 96 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Imitation-learning end-to-end planners, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2022.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Imitation-learning end-to-end planners](https://mlsanity.com/driving/imitation-learning-end-to-end-planners/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02410/) (2017)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [Simple Black-box Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07121/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06679/) (2021)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [MP3: A Unified Model to Map, Perceive, Predict and Plan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06806/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08265/) (2021)
- [TrafficSim: Learning to Simulate Realistic Multi-Agent Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06557/) (2021)
- [Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05519/) (2017)
- [Predicting Semantic Map Representations from Images using Pyramid Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13402/) (2020)
- [Cross-view Semantic Segmentation for Sensing Surroundings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03560/) (2019)
- [NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04456/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [Playing for Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07322/) (2017)
- [Perceive, Predict, and Plan: Safe Motion Planning Through Interpretable Semantic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05930/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Model-Free Reinforcement Learning for Urban Driving using Implicit Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10868/) (2019)
- [Prior Convictions: Black-Box Adversarial Attacks with Bandits and Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07978/) (2018)
- [Can Autonomous Vehicles Identify, Recover From, and Adapt to Distribution Shifts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14911/) (2020)
- [Generating Useful Accident-Prone Driving Scenarios via a Learned Traffic Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05077/) (2021)
- [AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06549/) (2021)
- [Meta-Sim: Learning to Generate Synthetic Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11621/) (2019)
- [Urban Driver: Learning to Drive from Real-world Demonstrations Using Policy Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13333/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 96)

- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [GenAD: Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09630/) (2024)
- [Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04218/) (2025)
- [GameFormer: Game-theoretic Modeling and Learning of Transformer-based Interactive Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05760/) (2023)
- [PlanT: Explainable Planning Transformers via Object-Level Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14222/) (2022)
- [Recent Advancements in End-to-End Autonomous Driving using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04370/) (2023)
- [HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01718/) (2024)
- [CAT: Closed-loop Adversarial Training for Safe End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12432/) (2023)
- [Scenario Diffusion: Controllable Driving Scenario Generation With Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02738/) (2023)
- [RealGen: Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controllable Traffic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13303/) (2023)
- [RAP: 3D Rasterization Augmented End-to-End Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04333/) (2025)
- [SAFE-SIM: Safety-Critical Closed-Loop Traffic Simulation with Diffusion-Controllable Adversaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00391/) (2023)
- [Can Vehicle Motion Planning Generalize to Realistic Long-tail Scenarios?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07569/) (2024)
- [CaRL: Learning Scalable Planning Policies with Simple Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17838/) (2025)
- [The Integration of Prediction and Planning in Deep Learning Automated Driving Systems: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05731/) (2023)
- [SLEDGE: Synthesizing Driving Environments with Generative Models and Rule-Based Traffic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17933/) (2024)
- [Learning Realistic Traffic Agents in Closed-loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01394/) (2023)
- [Delving into Multi-modal Multi-task Foundation Models for Road Scene Understanding: From Learning Paradigm Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02968/) (2024)
- [AdvDiffuser: Generating Adversarial Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08453/) (2024)
- [Coaching a Teachable Student](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10014/) (2023)
- [Hybrid-Prediction Integrated Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02426/) (2024)
- [A Review of Reward Functions for Reinforcement Learning in the context of Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01440/) (2024)
- [Perception Datasets for Anomaly Detection in Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02790/) (2023)
- [AD-H: Language-guided Autonomous Driving with Hierarchical Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03474/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Safety-Critical Scenario Generation using Naturalistic Human Driving Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03200/) (2024)
- [AnoVox: A Benchmark for Multimodal Anomaly Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07865/) (2024)
- [ResAD: Normalized Residual Trajectory Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08562/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Simulators offer the possibility of safe, low-cost development of self-driving systems. However, current driving simulators exhibit na"ive behavior models for background traffic. Hand-tuned scenarios are typically added during simulation to induce safety-critical situations. An alternative approach is to adversarially perturb the background traffic trajectories. In this paper, we study this approach to safety-critical driving scenario generation using the CARLA simulator. We use a kinematic bicycle model as a proxy to the simulator's true dynamics and observe that gradients through this proxy model are sufficient for optimizing the background traffic trajectories. Based on this finding, we propose KING, which generates safety-critical driving scenarios with a 20% higher success rate than black-box optimization. By solving the scenarios generated by KING using a privileged rule-based expert algorithm, we obtain training data for an imitation learning policy. After fine-tuning on this new data, we show that the policy becomes better at avoiding collisions. Importantly, our generated data leads to reduced collisions on both held-out scenarios generated via KING as well as traditional hand-crafted scenarios, demonstrating improved robustness.