Teach-to-Crash: A Closed-Loop Student–Teacher LLM Framework for Collision-Inducing Test Scenario Generation

Abstract

Validating Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) in simulation requires testing architectures that can discover rare, safety-critical failures while generating scenarios that are executable, diverse, and useful for downstream failure analysis. We introduce Teach-to-Crash, a closed-loop testing framework that combines a constrained ego-centric scenario representation, stagnation-aware search control, and a dual-LLM architecture for adaptive failure discovery. A high-reasoning Teacher LLM acts as an adaptive search controller, while a low-reasoning Student LLM emits simulator-executable scenarios in a strict JSON schema. The Teacher intervenes only when rolling collision rate and time-to-collision metrics stagnate, providing strategic guidance to redirect the search. In a CARLA case study with two experimental setups that vary the ego vehicle’s speed policy, Teach-to-Crash achieves the highest Collision Hit Rate (90.79%), the shortest mean Time-to-Collision (18.31s), and a competitive Collision Discovery Rate (136.21). PAFOT attains a higher mean CDR (179.44), but with substantially larger variance. Teach-to-Crash also yields the highest diversity (0.547) and, averaged across both setups on the CARLA Traffic Manager controller, the highest avoidability-based usefulness proxy (60.04%) among the compared methods. These results, within the evaluated CARLA scope, provide evidence that closed-loop dual-LLM reasoning can steer adversarial simulation-based testing over a constrained executable program space, generating failures that are frequent, structurally diverse, and assessed as more frequently avoidable.