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arXiv · 2502.05677

Surprise Potential as a Measure of Interactivity in Driving Scenarios

Wenhao Ding·Sushant Veer·Karen Leung·Yulong Cao·Marco Pavone
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Abstract

Validating the safety and performance of an autonomous vehicle (AV) requires benchmarking on real-world driving logs. However, typical driving logs contain mostly uneventful scenarios with minimal interactions between road users. Identifying interactive scenarios in real-world driving logs enables the curation of datasets that amplify critical signals and provide a more accurate assessment of an AV's performance. In this paper, we present a novel metric that identifies interactive scenarios by measuring an AV's surprise potential on others. First, we identify three dimensions of the design space to describe a family of surprise potential measures. Second, we exhaustively evaluate and compare different instantiations of the surprise potential measure within this design space on the nuScenes dataset. To determine how well a surprise potential measure correctly identifies an interactive scenario, we use a reward model learned from human preferences to assess alignment with human intuition. Our proposed surprise potential, arising from this exhaustive comparative study, achieves a correlation of more than 0.82 with the human-aligned reward function, outperforming existing approaches. Lastly, we validate motion planners on curated interactive scenarios to demonstrate downstream applications.

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Wenhao Ding, Sushant Veer, Karen Leung, Yulong Cao, Marco Pavone. 2025-02-08. Surprise Potential as a Measure of Interactivity in Driving Scenarios. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05677

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