Testing Rare Downstream Safety Violations via Upstream Adaptive Sampling of Perception Error Models. (arXiv:2209.09674v2 [cs.RO] UPDATED)

Testing black-box perceptual-control systems in simulation faces two
difficulties. Firstly, perceptual inputs in simulation lack the fidelity of
real-world sensor inputs. Secondly, for a reasonably accurate perception
system, encountering a rare failure trajectory may require running infeasibly
many simulations. This paper combines perception error models -- surrogates for
a sensor-based detection system -- with state-dependent adaptive importance
sampling. This allows us to efficiently assess the rare failure probabilities
for real-world perceptual control systems within simulation. Our experiments
with an autonomous …

arxiv error perception safety sampling testing