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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07255 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07255/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [A Gentle Introduction to Conformal Prediction and Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07511/) (2021)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Classification with Valid and Adaptive Coverage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02544/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Conformal Predictions for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07282/) (2022)
- [Likelihood Regret: An Out-of-Distribution Detection Score For Variational Auto-encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02977/) (2020)
- [Confidence-Aware Learning for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01458/) (2020)
- [Baidu Apollo EM Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08048/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Agent for Robotics Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10674/) (2021)
- [Calibrated Prediction with Covariate Shift via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00343/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Environmentally Robust Speech Recognition: An Overview of Recent Developments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10874/) (2017)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Learning from Demonstration using Mixture Density Networks with Sampling-Free Variance Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02249/) (2017)
- [Lightweight, Uncertainty-Aware Conformalized Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02207/) (2023)
- [Testing and verification of neural-network-based safety-critical control software: A systematic literature review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06715/) (2019)
- [Mutual Information-calibrated Conformal Feature Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal 3D Object Detection at the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09593/) (2023)
- [Conformalized Multimodal Uncertainty Regression and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11018/) (2023)
- [STARNet: Sensor Trustworthiness and Anomaly Recognition via Approximated Likelihood Regret for Robust Edge Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11006/) (2023)
- [Sense Less, Generate More: Pre-training LiDAR Perception with Masked Autoencoders for Ultra-Efficient 3D Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07833/) (2024)
- [INTACT: Inducing Noise Tolerance through Adversarial Curriculum Training for LiDAR-based Safety-Critical Perception and Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01896/) (2025)
- [Quantification of Uncertainties in Deep Learning-based Environment Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03018/) (2023)
- [Neural Precision Polarization: Simplifying Neural Network Inference with Dual-Level Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05845/) (2024)
- [Temporal Calibrated Regularization for Robust Noisy Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00240/) (2020)
- [Enhancing 3D Robotic Vision Robustness by Minimizing Adversarial Mutual Information through a Curriculum Training Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12379/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [VLM Judges Can Rank but Cannot Score: Task-Dependent Uncertainty in Multimodal Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25235/) (2026)
- [Learnable Conformal Prediction with Context-Aware Nonconformity Functions for Robotic Planning and Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21955/) (2025)
- [Calibrated Decomposition of Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Deep Features for Inference-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12389/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Guided Inference-Time Depth Adaptation for Transformer-Based Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16160/) (2026)
- [TRIAGE: Type-Routed Interventions via Aleatoric-Epistemic Gated Estimation in Robotic Manipulation and Adaptive Perception -- Don't Treat All Uncertainty the Same](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08128/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty Quantification for Computer-Use Agents: A Benchmark across Vision-Language Models and GUI Grounding Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25760/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.