#llm-behavior-modeling News & Analysis

General-purpose LLMs as Models of Human Driver Behavior: The Case of Simplified Merging

Researchers evaluated whether general-purpose LLMs (OpenAI o3 and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro) can model human driving behavior in autonomous vehicle safety testing by embedding them as standalone driver agents in a simplified merging scenario. While both models reproduced some human-like behaviors, they failed to consistently capture responses to dynamic velocity cues and diverged significantly on safety metrics, suggesting LLMs show promise as ready-to-use behavior models but require further validation.