Exploring Semantic Clustering and Similarity Search for Heterogeneous Traffic Scenario Graph
Scenario-based testing is an indispensable instrument for the comprehensive validation and verification of automated vehicles (AVs). However, finding a manageable and finite, yet representative subset of scenarios in a scalable, possibly unsupervised manner is notoriously challenging. Our work is meant to constitute a cornerstone to facilitate sample-efficient testing, while still capturing the diversity of relevant operational design domains (ODDs) and accounting for the "long tail" phenomenon in particular. To this end, we first propose an expressive and flexible heterogeneous, spatio-temporal graph model for representing traffic scenarios. Leveraging recent advances of graph neural networks (GNNs), we then propose a self-supervised method to learn a universal embedding space for scenario graphs that enables clustering and similarity search. In particular, we implement contrastive learning alongside a bootstrapping-based approach and evaluate their suitability for partitioning the scenario space. Experiments on the nuPlan dataset confirm the model's ability to capture semantics and thus group related scenarios in a meaningful way despite the absence of discrete class labels. Different scenario types materialize as distinct clusters. Our results demonstrate how variable-length traffic scenarios can be condensed into single vector representations that enable nearest-neighbor retrieval of representative candidates for distinct scenario categories. Notably, this is achieved without manual labeling or bias towards an explicit objective such as criticality. Ultimately, our approach can serve as a basis for scalable selection of scenarios to further enhance the efficiency and robustness of testing AVs in simulation.