(a) obtaining the AV trajectory and a reference trajectory, wherein the reference trajectory describes a desired motion of a vehicle in the driving scenario;

(b) determining a plurality of component divergence values for a plurality of divergence metrics, wherein a respective divergence value characterizes a respective difference between the AV trajectory and the reference trajectory;

(c) providing the plurality of component divergence values to a machine-learned model to generate a score that indicates an aggregate divergence between the AV trajectory and the reference trajectory, wherein the machine-learned model comprises a plurality of learned parameters defining an influence of the plurality of component divergence values on the score; and

(d) validating the AV trajectory based on the score.