Poirot: Automatic Root Cause Analysis of Safety Violations in ADS Simulation Testing via Hypothetical Reasoning

With the rapid development of autonomous driving systems (ADSs), it has become critical to ensure their operational safety, leading to the widespread adoption of simulation testing. While existing scenario-based simulation testing approaches have demonstrated effectiveness in detecting safety violations, they often fall short in providing insight into the underlying causes of these violations, which is an essential capability for improving the safety and reliability of ADSs. To address this limitation, we propose a two-phase novel framework, Poirot, for root cause analysis in simulation testing via hypothetical reasoning. Given a reproducible violation scenario, in the module-level analysis phase, Poirot replays the violation scenario, and identifies the faulty module by iteratively replacing an actual module with an idealized module and checking whether the violation persists. In the component-level analysis phase, depending on the identified faulty module, Poirot further applies either hypothetical reasoning with a suspicion-guided search strategy or causal analysis to narrow the fault space and pinpoint the faulty component. We evaluate Poirot with two ADSs, i.e., Apollo and Autoware, on a comprehensive benchmark that includes a total of 80 real and injected faults along with their triggering scenarios. Compared with the state-of-the-art root cause analysis approaches, i.e., ACAV and Rocas, Poirot improves the module-level accuracy by 187.29% on average; and identifies the faulty components at a finer granularity, achieving component-level accuracy of 90.62%. Our ablation study shows that our suspicion-guided search strategy in Poirot efficiently reduces the exploration of the fault space by 58.77%, leading to a 65.41% reduction in the time for fault localization. Finally, applied to two scenario-based simulation testing methods, i.e., AvFuzzer and MoDitector, Poirot attributes 425 violation scenarios to 8 faults, cutting debugging time by 94.59% compared to manual analysis in practice.

Recommended citation: You Lu, Dingji Wang, Kun Zhang, Bihuan Chen, Jiyan Zhang, and Xin Peng. 2026. Poirot: Automatic Root Cause Analysis of Safety Violations in ADS Simulation Testing via Hypothetical Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 35rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA ’26). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 23 pages.
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