Revealing Safety-Critical Scenarios for UTM via Transformer

H Tang, B Zeng, C Wang, Z Shi, Q Zhang… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2026 - arxiv.org
H Tang, B Zeng, C Wang, Z Shi, Q Zhang, W Ding
arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.31114, 2026arxiv.org
Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems are cloud-based platforms designed to
manage and coordinate multiple aerial vehicles remotely. UTM systems are safety-critical
which cannot tolerate failures like crash or collision. To reveal latent vulnerabilities, there are
neither optimal failure-exposing demonstrations nor clear reward signals. Additionally,
UTM's self-healing capability introduces the``long-tail effect''of critical failures. We propose
framing UTM vulnerability discovery as a sequence modeling problem amenable to …
Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems are cloud-based platforms designed to manage and coordinate multiple aerial vehicles remotely. UTM systems are safety-critical which cannot tolerate failures like crash or collision. To reveal latent vulnerabilities, there are neither optimal failure-exposing demonstrations nor clear reward signals. Additionally, UTM's self-healing capability introduces the ``long-tail effect'' of critical failures. We propose framing UTM vulnerability discovery as a sequence modeling problem amenable to transformer-based RL architectures. Our approach leverages attention mechanisms to directly model the relationship among system states, and predict optimal actions. Our framework introduces a Policy Model that generates targeted test scenarios and an Action Sampler that enforces domain constraints. We use a risk-based reward function to guide exploration. Through extensive evaluation on a 700-hour simulation study, we demonstrate an 8 improvement in vulnerability discovery efficiency compared to expert-guided testing. It also discovers critical edge cases that traditional methods have missed.
arxiv.org