Papers › Using Diffusion Ensembles to Estimate Uncertainty for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

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

31 May 2025arXiv:2506.00560archive 2025-07-28

Florian Wintel, Sigmund H. Høeg, Gabriel Kiss, Frank Lindseth

End-to-end planning systems for autonomous driving are improving rapidly, 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, multi-modal future trajectory spaces, where there are multiple plausible options. EnDfuser achieves a competitive driving score of 70.1 on the Longest6 benchmark in CARLA with minimal concessions on inference speed. Our findings suggest that ensemble diffusion, used as a drop-in replacement for traditional point-estimate trajectory planning modules, can help improve the safety of driving decisions by modeling the uncertainty of the posterior trajectory distribution.

PaperPDF

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Autonomous DrivingCARLA longest6Trajectory Planning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
CARLA longest6 CARLA EnDfuser + safety-rule Driving Score 70 #5 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA longest6 CARLA EnDfuser + safety-rule Infraction Score 0.76 #5 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA longest6 CARLA EnDfuser + safety-rule Route Completion 90 #5 of 21 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

AttentionAttention PoolingCARLADiffusionEntropy RegularizationPPOSETSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections