{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/bits-bi-level-imitation-for-traffic","title":"BITS: Bi-level Imitation for Traffic Simulation","arxiv_id":"2208.12403","date":"2022-08-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Danfei Xu","Yuxiao Chen","Boris Ivanovic","Marco Pavone"],"abstract":"Simulation is the key to scaling up validation and verification for robotic systems such as autonomous vehicles. Despite advances in high-fidelity physics and sensor simulation, a critical gap remains in simulating realistic behaviors of road users. This is because, unlike simulating physics and graphics, devising first principle models for human-like behaviors is generally infeasible. In this work, we take a data-driven approach and propose a method that can learn to generate traffic behaviors from real-world driving logs. The method achieves high sample efficiency and behavior diversity by exploiting the bi-level hierarchy of driving behaviors by decoupling the traffic simulation problem into high-level intent inference and low-level driving behavior imitation. The method also incorporates a planning module to obtain stable long-horizon behaviors. We empirically validate our method, named Bi-level Imitation for Traffic Simulation (BITS), with scenarios from two large-scale driving datasets and show that BITS achieves balanced traffic simulation performance in realism, diversity, and long-horizon stability. We also explore ways to evaluate behavior realism and introduce a suite of evaluation metrics for traffic simulation. Finally, as part of our core contributions, we develop and open source a software tool that unifies data formats across different driving datasets and converts scenes from existing datasets into interactive simulation environments. For additional information and videos, see https://sites.google.com/view/nvr-bits2022/home","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.12403v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.12403v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"bits-bi-level-imitation-for-traffic","repo_url":"https://github.com/nvlabs/traffic-behavior-simulation","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"autonomous-vehicles","task_name":"Autonomous Vehicles"},{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2208.12403","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}