Lin, Enli (Tsinghua University), Yang, Ziyuan (Tsinghua University), Lu, Qiujing (Tsinghua University), HU, Jianming (Tsinghua University), Feng, Shuo (Tsinghua University)

IntersectioNDE: Learning Complex Urban Traffic Dynamics Based on Interaction Decoupling Strategy

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "S42b-Safety and Risk Assessment for Autonomous Driving Systems" (FR-EA-T42), Friday, November 21, 2025, 14:50−15:30, Broadbeach 3

2025 IEEE 28th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), November 18-21, 2025, Gold Coast, Australia

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on October 18, 2025

Abstract

Realistic traffic simulation is critical for ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially in complex and diverse urban traffic environments. However, existing data-driven simulators face two key challenges: a limited focus on modeling dense, heterogeneous interactions at urban intersections—which are prevalent, crucial, and practically significant in countries like China, featuring diverse agents including motorized vehicles (MVs), non-motorized vehicles (NMVs), and pedestrians—and the inherent difficulty in robustly learning high-dimensional joint distributions for such high-density scenes, often leading to mode collapse and long-term simulation instability. We introduce City Crossings Dataset (CiCross), a large-scale dataset collected from a real-world urban intersection, uniquely capturing dense, heterogeneous multi-agent interactions, particularly with a substantial proportion of MVs, NMVs and pedestrians. Based on this dataset, we propose IntersectioNDE (Intersection Naturalistic Driving Environment), a data-driven simulator tailored for complex urban intersection scenarios. Its core component is the Interaction Decoupling Strategy (IDS), a training paradigm that learns compositional dynamics from agent subsets, enabling the marginal-to-joint simulation. Integrated into a scene-aware Transformer network with specialized training techniques, IDS significantly enhances simulation robustness and long-term stability for modeling heterogeneous interactions. Experiments on CiCross show that IntersectioNDE outperforms baseline methods in simulation fidelity, stability, and its ability to replicate complex, distribution-level urban traffic dynamics.