Evaluating Physical Consistency and Plausibility in Generative Scenario Models for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Generative AI models are increasingly used for scenario generation in autonomous driving. While they can generate realistic-looking scenarios, they often provide limited transparency into learned representations and consistency with real-world vehicle dynamics. This lack of formal assurance limits their use in safety-critical validation and certification workflows. To address this aspect, we introduce a layered evaluation protocol that complements existing methods by assessing models across five layers. The first four layers inspect internal representations and network layers through kinematic alignment, statistical baseline comparison, latent controllability, and activation analysis. The fifth layer evaluates model outputs against vehicle dynamics constraints such as lateral jerk thresholds. We demonstrate the protocol on a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based scenario generator. Although standard output-level metrics and visualizations suggest that the generated scenarios are realistic, our protocol provides deeper insight into the extent to which the model's latent space aligns with kinematic features and whether visually plausible trajectories satisfy vehicle-dynamics constraints. We further apply the protocol to additional generative models, demonstrating its applicability beyond the VAE architecture.