Simulating realistic behaviors of traffic agents is pivotal for efficiently validating the safety of autonomous driving systems. Existing data-driven simulators primarily use an encoder-decoder architecture to encode the historical trajectories before decoding the future. However, the heterogeneity between encoders and decoders complicates the models, and the manual separation of historical and future trajectories leads to low data utilization. Given these limitations, we propose BehaviorGPT, a homogeneous and fully autoregressive Transformer designed to simulate the sequential behavior of multiple agents.

Simulating realistic behaviors of traffic agents is pivotal for efficiently validating the safety of autonomous driving systems. Existing data-driven simulators primarily use an encoder-decoder architecture to encode the historical trajectories before decoding the future. However, the heterogeneity between encoders and decoders complicates the models, and the manual separation of historical and future trajectories leads to low data utilization. Given these limitations, we propose BehaviorGPT, a homogeneous and fully autoregressive Transformer designed to simulate the sequential behavior of multiple agents. We further introduce the Next-Patch Prediction Paradigm (NP3) to mitigate the negative effects of autoregressive modeling, in which models are trained to reason at the patch level of trajectories and capture long-range spatial-temporal interactions.

Simulating realistic interactions among traffic agents is crucial for efficiently validating the safety of autonomous driving systems. Existing leading simulators primarily use an encoder-decoder structure to encode the historical trajectories for future simulation. However, such a paradigm complicates the model architecture, and the manual separation of history and future trajectories leads to low data utilization. To address these challenges, we propose Behavior Generative Pre-trained Transformers (BehaviorGPT), a decoder-only, autoregressive architecture designed to simulate the sequential motion of multiple agents. Crucially, our approach discards the traditional separation between "history" and "future," treating each time step as the "current" one, resulting in a simpler, more parameter- and data-efficient design that scales seamlessly with data and computation. Additionally, we introduce the Next-Patch Prediction Paradigm (NP3), which enables models to reason at the patch level of trajectories and capture long-range spatial-temporal interactions. BehaviorGPT ranks first across several metrics on the Waymo Sim Agents Benchmark, demonstrating its exceptional performance in multi-agent and agent-map interactions. We outperformed state-of-the-art models with a realism score of 0.741 and improved the minADE metric to 1.540, with an approximately 91.6% reduction in model parameters.