TrafficSim: Learning to Simulate Realistic Multi-Agent Behaviors

Simulation has the potential to massively scale evaluation of self-driving systems, enabling rapid development as well as safe deployment. Bridging the gap between simulation and the real world requires realistic multi-agent behaviors. Existing simulation environments rely on heuristic-based models that directly encode traffic rules, which cannot capture irregular maneuvers (e.g., nudging, U-turns) and complex interactions (e.g., yielding, merging). In contrast, we leverage real-world data to learn directly from human demonstration, and thus capture more naturalistic driving behaviors. To this end, we propose TrafficSim, a multi-agent behavior model for realistic traffic simulation. In particular, we parameterize the policy with an implicit la-tent variable model that generates socially-consistent plans for all actors in the scene jointly. To learn a robust policy amenable for long horizon simulation, we unroll the policy in training and optimize through the fully differentiable simulation across time. Our learning objective incorporates both human demonstrations as well as common sense. We show TrafficSim generates significantly more realistic traffic scenarios as compared to a diverse set of baselines. Notably, we can exploit trajectories generated by TrafficSim as effective data augmentation for training better motion planner.