Beyond Confidence: Adaptive Abstention in Dual-Threshold Conformal Prediction for Autonomous System Perception

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kumar, Divake, Darabi, Nastaran, Tayebati, Sina, Trivedi, Amit Ranjan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Kumar, Divake
Darabi, Nastaran
Tayebati, Sina
Trivedi, Amit Ranjan
author_facet Kumar, Divake
Darabi, Nastaran
Tayebati, Sina
Trivedi, Amit Ranjan
contents Safety-critical perception systems require both reliable uncertainty quantification and principled abstention mechanisms to maintain safety under diverse operational conditions. We present a novel dual-threshold conformalization framework that provides statistically-guaranteed uncertainty estimates while enabling selective prediction in high-risk scenarios. Our approach uniquely combines a conformal threshold ensuring valid prediction sets with an abstention threshold optimized through ROC analysis, providing distribution-free coverage guarantees (>= 1 - alpha) while identifying unreliable predictions. Through comprehensive evaluation on CIFAR-100, ImageNet1K, and ModelNet40 datasets, we demonstrate superior robustness across camera and LiDAR modalities under varying environmental perturbations. The framework achieves exceptional detection performance (AUC: 0.993 to 0.995) under severe conditions while maintaining high coverage (>90.0%) and enabling adaptive abstention (13.5% to 63.4% +/- 0.5) as environmental severity increases. For LiDAR-based perception, our approach demonstrates particularly strong performance, maintaining robust coverage (>84.5%) while appropriately abstaining from unreliable predictions. Notably, the framework shows remarkable stability under heavy perturbations, with detection performance (AUC: 0.995 +/- 0.001) significantly outperforming existing methods across all modalities. Our unified approach bridges the gap between theoretical guarantees and practical deployment needs, offering a robust solution for safety-critical autonomous systems operating in challenging real-world conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Confidence: Adaptive Abstention in Dual-Threshold Conformal Prediction for Autonomous System Perception
Kumar, Divake
Darabi, Nastaran
Tayebati, Sina
Trivedi, Amit Ranjan
Robotics
Machine Learning
Safety-critical perception systems require both reliable uncertainty quantification and principled abstention mechanisms to maintain safety under diverse operational conditions. We present a novel dual-threshold conformalization framework that provides statistically-guaranteed uncertainty estimates while enabling selective prediction in high-risk scenarios. Our approach uniquely combines a conformal threshold ensuring valid prediction sets with an abstention threshold optimized through ROC analysis, providing distribution-free coverage guarantees (>= 1 - alpha) while identifying unreliable predictions. Through comprehensive evaluation on CIFAR-100, ImageNet1K, and ModelNet40 datasets, we demonstrate superior robustness across camera and LiDAR modalities under varying environmental perturbations. The framework achieves exceptional detection performance (AUC: 0.993 to 0.995) under severe conditions while maintaining high coverage (>90.0%) and enabling adaptive abstention (13.5% to 63.4% +/- 0.5) as environmental severity increases. For LiDAR-based perception, our approach demonstrates particularly strong performance, maintaining robust coverage (>84.5%) while appropriately abstaining from unreliable predictions. Notably, the framework shows remarkable stability under heavy perturbations, with detection performance (AUC: 0.995 +/- 0.001) significantly outperforming existing methods across all modalities. Our unified approach bridges the gap between theoretical guarantees and practical deployment needs, offering a robust solution for safety-critical autonomous systems operating in challenging real-world conditions.
title Beyond Confidence: Adaptive Abstention in Dual-Threshold Conformal Prediction for Autonomous System Perception
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07255