Adv-BMT: Bidirectional Motion Transformer for Safety-Critical Traffic Scenario Generation

Scenario-based testing is essential for validating the performance of autonomous driving (AD) systems. However, such testing is limited by the scarcity of long-tailed, safety-critical scenarios in existing datasets collected in the real world. To tackle the data issue, we propose the Adv-BMT framework, which augments real-world scenarios with diverse and realistic adversarial interactions. The core component of Adv-BMT is a bidirectional motion transformer (BMT) model to perform inverse traffic motion predictions, which takes the last frame of the scenario as input and reconstruct the traffic in the inverse of chronological order, till the initial time step. The Adv-BMT framework is a two-stage pipeline: it first conducts adversarial initializations and then inverse motion predictions. Different from previous work, we do not need any collision data for pretraining and are still able to generate realistic and diverse collision interactions. Our experimental results validate the quality of generated collision scenarios by Adv-BMT: training in our augmented dataset would reduce episode collision rates by 20\% compared to previous work. The code will be made available.