SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SIMULATING AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE TESTING ENVIRONMENTS

A system and method for safety testing a host autonomous vehicle (AV). This method includes: generating a trained machine learning (ML) agent and testing the host AV in an environment that includes one or more background vehicles configured to operate according to the trained ML agent. The ML agent is generated by: (i) obtaining a testing state model having non-safety-critical states and safety-critical states, (ii) editing the testing state model to obtain an edited testing state model that omits data concerning the non-safety-critical states, and (iii) training a ML agent using the edited state testing model so as to generate the trained ML agent.