INTR Seminar | Prof. Xintao YAN from University of Hong Kong
Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology holds the promise of transforming future transportation systems, but its large-scale deployment requires rigorous safety evaluation. To address this need, we propose a behavioral safety assessment program to evaluate AV driving intelligence, consisting of two key components: (1) high-fidelity simulations that replicate real-world driving conditions, and (2) efficient testing strategies to accelerate validation. Central to this is modeling a Naturalistic Driving Environment (NDE) with distribution-level accuracy. We develop a deep learning-based framework to simulate statistically realistic human driving behavior, particularly for those long-tail safety-critical events. However, directly testing in the NDE is inefficient due to the rarity of such events. To address this, we introduce the Naturalistic and Adversarial Driving Environment (NADE), reducing test mileage without sacrificing accuracy. The proposed AV behavioral safety assessment program has been successfully deployed at physical testing facilities for real-world AV evaluation.