The Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Datasets and Benchmarks Track

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Nico Montali, John Lambert, Paul Mougin, Alex Kuefler, Nicholas Rhinehart, Michelle Li, Cole Gulino, Tristan Emrich, Zoey Yang, Shimon Whiteson, Brandyn White, Dragomir Anguelov

Abstract

Simulation with realistic, interactive agents represents a key task for autonomous vehicle software development. In this work, we introduce the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC). WOSAC is the first public challenge to tackle this task and propose corresponding metrics. The goal of the challenge is to stimulate the design of realistic simulators that can be used to evaluate and train a behavior model for autonomous driving. We outline our evaluation methodology, present results for a number of different baseline simulation agent methods, and analyze several submissions to the 2023 competition which ran from March 16, 2023 to May 23, 2023. The WOSAC evaluation server remains open for submissions and we discuss open problems for the task.