TerrainForge: Physics-Grounded Road Geometry Editing for Counterfactual Autonomous Driving

Road geometry (e.g., crests, sags, and speed humps) and surface conditions (e.g., wet or icy pavement) affect how vehicles move, what drivers and onboard cameras observe, and how much clearance remains between vehicles. Editing these properties in a driving scene therefore requires corresponding changes in vehicle motion. Capturing these differences in a driving video requires a road edit to propagate to vehicle motion, camera viewpoint, and the clearance between vehicles. We present TerrainForge, a framework for generating road geometry-focused counterfactuals from reconstructed multi-vehicle driving episodes. A unified road model connects scene deformation with four-wheel vehicle dynamics, allowing crests, sags, speed humps, and friction changes to propagate through vehicle motion, camera viewpoint, and inter-vehicle clearance. Vehicle dynamics are evaluated against CarSim, and prescribed road geometry is verified in reconstructed Waymo scenes. Across 18 episodes, leaving surrounding vehicles on their recorded trajectories instead of recomputing their responses produces median peak differences in predicted ego-lead distance of 1.52 m for crests and 1.41 m for sags. We further simulate the ego response to 15,758 road edits across 983 braking episodes, pairing each edit with its safety outcomes relative to an unedited replay. These pairs train a first-stage screening surrogate that takes the original driving context and candidate road-edit parameters as input and predicts the resulting change in the ego's terminal gap. On held-out scenes, this prediction achieves 22-40% lower mean absolute error than predicting no change, so candidates can be screened cheaply before the full multi-vehicle rollout.