Realistic Corner Case Generation for Autonomous Vehicles with Multimodal Large Language Model

To guarantee the safety and reliability of Autonomous Vehicle (AV) systems, corner cases play a crucial role in exploring the system’s behavior under rare and challenging conditions within simulation environments. However, current approaches often fall short in meeting diverse testing needs and struggle to generalize to novel, high-risk scenarios that closely mirror real-world conditions. To tackle this challenge, we present AutoScenario, a multimodal Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework for realistic corner case generation. It converts safety-critical real-world data from multiple sources into textual representations, enabling the generalization of key risk factors while leveraging the extensive world knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Furthermore, it integrates tools from the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) and Car Learning to Act (CARLA) simulators to automatically interpret and execute the scenario code by LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that AutoScenario can generate realistic and challenging test scenarios, precisely tailored to specific testing requirements or textual descriptions. Additionally, we validated its ability to produce diverse and novel scenarios derived from multimodal real-world data involving risky situations, harnessing the powerful generalization capabilities of LLMs to effectively simulate a wide range of corner cases. The implementation is available at https://github.com/THU-AI-Testing/AutoScenario.