So How Likely Is a Car Crash? Estimating Rare Failure Events in Simulated Scenarios
Abstract: Scenario-based Simulated Testing is a common paradigm for testing complex cyber-physical systems like autonomous vehicles. This is particularly true for systems containing black-box ML components, which make formal verification or traditional engineering analysis difficult. However, answering the simple question of "how likely is it that the system will fail to meet its specification?" can actually be a significant challenge, especially when the true failure probability is rare.