Learning naturalistic driving environment with statistical realism

For simulation to be an effective tool for the development and testing of autonomous vehicles, the simulator must be able to produce realistic safety-critical scenarios with distribution-level accuracy. However, due to the high dimensionality of real-world driving environments and the rarity of long-tail safety-critical events, how to achieve statistical realism in simulation is a long-standing problem. In this paper, we develop NeuralNDE, a deep learning-based framework to learn multi-agent interaction behavior from vehicle trajectory data, and propose a conflict critic model and a safety mapping network to refine the generation process of safety-critical events, following real-world occurring frequencies and patterns. The results show that NeuralNDE can achieve both accurate safety-critical driving statistics (e.g., crash rate/type/severity and near-miss statistics, etc.) and normal driving statistics (e.g., vehicle speed/distance/yielding behavior distributions, etc.), as demonstrated in the simulation of urban driving environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a simulation model can reproduce the real-world driving environment with statistical realism, particularly for safety-critical situations.