English

ScenePilot: Controllable Boundary-Driven Critical Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-27 v2

Abstract

Safety-critical scenarios are central to evaluating autonomous driving systems, yet their rarity in naturalistic logs makes simulation-based stress testing indispensable. Most scenario generation methods treat surrounding agents as adversaries, but they either (i) induce failures without explicitly modeling vehicle-road physical limits, yielding visually extreme yet physically unsolvable crashes, or (ii) enforce physical feasibility or policy feasibility in isolation, which can over-focus on aggressive maneuvers or remain tied to a controller-dependent capability boundary. We propose ScenePilot, a feasibility-guided, boundary-driven framework that targets the boundary band: scenarios that are physically solvable in principle yet still cause the deployed autonomy stack to fail. We formulate generation as constrained multi-objective reinforcement learning, combining an RSS-derived physical-feasibility score σ\sigma with an online-learned AV-risk predictor Φ\Phi, and introduce step-level feasibility-aware shielding to keep exploration near the feasibility boundary while avoiding infeasible artifacts. Experiments on SafeBench with multiple planners show that ScenePilot yields substantially higher collision rates (+6.2 percentage points) while preserving physical validity, and that adversarial fine-tuning on these boundary-band scenarios consistently reduces downstream crash rates. The code is available at https://github.com/QiyuRuan/ScenePilot.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.21168,
  title  = {ScenePilot: Controllable Boundary-Driven Critical Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving},
  author = {Qiyu Ruan and Yuxuan Wang and He Li and Zhenning Li and Cheng-zhong Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.21168},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:24:01.680Z