Interpretable Decision-Making for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mirzaie, Mona, Rosenhahn, Bodo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mirzaie, Mona
Rosenhahn, Bodo
author_facet Mirzaie, Mona
Rosenhahn, Bodo
contents Trustworthy AI is mandatory for the broad deployment of autonomous vehicles. Although end-to-end approaches derive control commands directly from raw data, interpreting these decisions remains challenging, especially in complex urban scenarios. This is mainly attributed to very deep neural networks with non-linear decision boundaries, making it challenging to grasp the logic behind AI-driven decisions. This paper presents a method to enhance interpretability while optimizing control commands in autonomous driving. To address this, we propose loss functions that promote the interpretability of our model by generating sparse and localized feature maps. The feature activations allow us to explain which image regions contribute to the predicted control command. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies on the feature extraction step and validate our method on the CARLA benchmarks. We also demonstrate that our approach improves interpretability, which correlates with reducing infractions, yielding a safer, high-performance driving model. Notably, our monocular, non-ensemble model surpasses the top-performing approaches from the CARLA Leaderboard by achieving lower infraction scores and the highest route completion rate, all while ensuring interpretability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Interpretable Decision-Making for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Mirzaie, Mona
Rosenhahn, Bodo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
Trustworthy AI is mandatory for the broad deployment of autonomous vehicles. Although end-to-end approaches derive control commands directly from raw data, interpreting these decisions remains challenging, especially in complex urban scenarios. This is mainly attributed to very deep neural networks with non-linear decision boundaries, making it challenging to grasp the logic behind AI-driven decisions. This paper presents a method to enhance interpretability while optimizing control commands in autonomous driving. To address this, we propose loss functions that promote the interpretability of our model by generating sparse and localized feature maps. The feature activations allow us to explain which image regions contribute to the predicted control command. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies on the feature extraction step and validate our method on the CARLA benchmarks. We also demonstrate that our approach improves interpretability, which correlates with reducing infractions, yielding a safer, high-performance driving model. Notably, our monocular, non-ensemble model surpasses the top-performing approaches from the CARLA Leaderboard by achieving lower infraction scores and the highest route completion rate, all while ensuring interpretability.
title Interpretable Decision-Making for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18898