Simulation testing has been widely adopted by leading companies to ensure the safety of autonomous driving systems (ADSs). Anumber of scenario-based testing approaches have been developed to generate diverse driving scenarios for simulation testing, and demonstrated to be capable of finding safety violations. However, there is no automated way to diagnose whether these violations are caused by the ADS under test and which category these violations belong to. As a result, great effort is required to manually diagnose violations.

To bridge this gap, we propose DiaVio to automatically diagnose safety violations in simulation testing by leveraging large language models (LLMs). It is built on top of a new domain specific language (DSL) of crash to align real-world accident reports described in natural language and violation scenarios in simulation testing. DiaVio fine-tunes a base LLM with real-world accident reports to learn diagnosis capability, and uses the fine-tuned LLM to diagnose violation scenarios in simulation testing. Our evaluation has demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of DiaVio in violation diagnosis.