# Human Behavior-Informed Crash Scenario Generation with Real-World Crash Priors for Autonomous Vehicle Safety Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04366 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04366/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Adversarial scenarios and safety testing, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 30 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Adversarial scenarios and safety testing](https://mlsanity.com/driving/adversarial-scenarios-and-safety-testing/)

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

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11810/) (2021)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [TrafficSim: Learning to Simulate Realistic Multi-Agent Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06557/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15564/) (2025)
- [Generating Useful Accident-Prone Driving Scenarios via a Learned Traffic Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05077/) (2021)
- [Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01893/) (2023)
- [AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06549/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Safety-Critical Driving Scenario Generation -- A Methodological Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02215/) (2022)
- [KING: Generating Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios for Robust Imitation via Kinematics Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13683/) (2022)
- [DADA: Driver Attention Prediction in Driving Accident Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12148/) (2019)
- [SAFE-SIM: Safety-Critical Closed-Loop Traffic Simulation with Diffusion-Controllable Adversaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00391/) (2023)
- [LLM-attacker: Enhancing Closed-loop Adversarial Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15850/) (2025)
- [LD-Scene: LLM-Guided Diffusion for Controllable Generation of Adversarial Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11247/) (2025)
- [World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19836/) (2026)
- [Modeling driver's evasive behavior during safety-critical lane changes:Two-dimensional time-to-collision and deep reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15133/) (2022)
- [Safety-Critical Traffic Simulation with Guided Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00515/) (2025)
- [nuPlan-R: A Closed-Loop Planning Benchmark for Autonomous Driving via Reactive Multi-Agent Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10403/) (2025)
- [Learning collision risk proactively from naturalistic driving data at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13556/) (2025)
- [VLM as Strategist: Adaptive Generation of Safety-critical Testing Scenarios via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02844/) (2025)
- [AnchorDrive: LLM Scenario Rollout with Anchor-Guided Diffusion Regeneration for Safety-Critical Scenario Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02542/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable safety evaluation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is essential to improving road safety, yet it depends critically on realistic simulation of rare crashes. Existing crash scenario generation methods can increase collision occurrence, but often fail to realistically reproduce how crashes evolve before impact or the distribution of crash types observed in the real world. Here, we present CrashSim, a human behavior-informed crash scenario generation framework that uses real-world crash priors to guide generative multi-agent traffic simulation for more reliable AV safety evaluation. These priors capture how real-world crashes evolve before impact and how different crash types are distributed, allowing limited crash data to guide realistic and scalable scenario generation across naturalistic driving contexts. We evaluate CrashSim against competing methods, showing that it more closely reproduces real-world pre-impact behavior, collision dynamics, collision geometry and crash-type distributions. We further use CrashSim to construct nuCrash dataset, containing over 4,000 crash and near-crash scenarios. Closed-loop evaluation of five AV planners shows that nuCrash more effectively exposes differences in planner safety capabilities than nuScenes. An LLM-assisted evaluation agent further analyzes planner failures to provide capability-level diagnoses and targeted improvement guidance. Together, CrashSim enables realistic and scalable crash generation for more informative AV safety evaluation.