Generation of Multiple Types of Driving Scenarios with a Unified Generative Model for Autonomous Driving

Manasa Mariam Mammen

Keywords: automated driving, variational autoencoder, unified generative model, scenario-generation

Abstract: Generating realistic and diverse driving scenarios is essential for effective scenario-based testing and validation in autonomous driving and development of driver assistance systems. Traditionally, parametric models are used as standard approach for scenario generation, but they require detailed domain expertise, suffer from scalability issues, and often introduce biases due to idealizations. Recent research has demonstrated that Variational Autoencoders can generate more realistic driving scenarios with reduced manual effort. However, these demonstrations typically focused on single scenario types, such as cut-in maneuvers, which limits their applicability to diverse real-world driving situations. This work, therefore, proposes a unified generative framework that can simultaneously generate multiple types of driving scenarios, including cut-in, cut-out, and cut-through maneuvers from both directions, thus covering six distinct driving behaviors. The model not only learns to generate realistic trajectories but also reflects the same statistical properties as observed in real-world data, which is essential for risk assessment. Comprehensive evaluations, including quantitative metrics and visualizations from detailed latent and physical space analyses, demonstrate that the unified model achieves comparable performance to individually trained models. The shown approach reduces modeling complexity and offers a scalable solution for generating diverse, safety-relevant driving scenarios, supporting robust testing and validation.

Submission Number: 197