Using Ensemble Diffusion to Estimate Uncertainty for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

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Hauptverfasser: Wintel, Florian, Høeg, Sigmund H., Kiss, Gabriel, Lindseth, Frank
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wintel, Florian
Høeg, Sigmund H.
Kiss, Gabriel
Lindseth, Frank
author_facet Wintel, Florian
Høeg, Sigmund H.
Kiss, Gabriel
Lindseth, Frank
contents End-to-end planning systems for autonomous driving are rapidly improving, especially in closed-loop simulation environments like CARLA. Many such driving systems either do not consider uncertainty as part of the plan itself or obtain it by using specialized representations that do not generalize. In this paper, we propose EnDfuser, an end-to-end driving system that uses a diffusion model as the trajectory planner. EnDfuser effectively leverages complex perception information like fused camera and LiDAR features, through combining attention pooling and trajectory planning into a single diffusion transformer module. Instead of committing to a single plan, EnDfuser produces a distribution of candidate trajectories (128 for our case) from a single perception frame through ensemble diffusion. By observing the full set of candidate trajectories, EnDfuser provides interpretability for uncertain, multimodal future trajectory spaces. Using this information we design a simplistic safety-rule that improves the system's driving score by 1.7% on the LAV benchmark. Our findings suggest that ensemble diffusion, used as a drop-in replacement for traditional point-estimate trajectory planning modules, can contribute to an uncertainty-aware decision making process in End-to-End driving policies by modeling the uncertainty of the posterior trajectory distribution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00560
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Using Ensemble Diffusion to Estimate Uncertainty for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Wintel, Florian
Høeg, Sigmund H.
Kiss, Gabriel
Lindseth, Frank
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
End-to-end planning systems for autonomous driving are rapidly improving, especially in closed-loop simulation environments like CARLA. Many such driving systems either do not consider uncertainty as part of the plan itself or obtain it by using specialized representations that do not generalize. In this paper, we propose EnDfuser, an end-to-end driving system that uses a diffusion model as the trajectory planner. EnDfuser effectively leverages complex perception information like fused camera and LiDAR features, through combining attention pooling and trajectory planning into a single diffusion transformer module. Instead of committing to a single plan, EnDfuser produces a distribution of candidate trajectories (128 for our case) from a single perception frame through ensemble diffusion. By observing the full set of candidate trajectories, EnDfuser provides interpretability for uncertain, multimodal future trajectory spaces. Using this information we design a simplistic safety-rule that improves the system's driving score by 1.7% on the LAV benchmark. Our findings suggest that ensemble diffusion, used as a drop-in replacement for traditional point-estimate trajectory planning modules, can contribute to an uncertainty-aware decision making process in End-to-End driving policies by modeling the uncertainty of the posterior trajectory distribution.
title Using Ensemble Diffusion to Estimate Uncertainty for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00560