# UncAD: Towards Safe End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Online Map Uncertainty

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12826 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12826/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [End-to-end system architecture](https://mlsanity.com/driving/end-to-end-system-architecture/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [MapTR: Structured Modeling and Learning for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14437/) (2022)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08920/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06679/) (2021)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)
- [GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11502/) (2024)
- [D3VO: Deep Depth, Deep Pose and Deep Uncertainty for Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01060/) (2020)
- [MapTRv2: An End-to-End Framework for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05736/) (2023)
- [On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/) (2020)
- [A General Framework for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06890/) (2019)
- [Estimating and Exploiting the Aleatoric Uncertainty in Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09881/) (2021)
- [Recent Advancements in End-to-End Autonomous Driving using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04370/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Raycasting for Self-supervised Occupancy Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01917/) (2022)
- [ADAPT: Action-aware Driving Caption Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00673/) (2023)
- [Real-Time Anomaly Detection and Reactive Planning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08735/) (2024)
- [FusionAD: Multi-modality Fusion for Prediction and Planning Tasks of Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01006/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty Quantification with Statistical Guarantees in End-to-End Autonomous Driving Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09884/) (2019)
- [Uncertainty-Aware CNNs for Depth Completion: Uncertainty from Beginning to End](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03349/) (2020)
- [TOD3Cap: Towards 3D Dense Captioning in Outdoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19589/) (2024)
- [STEPS: Joint Self-supervised Nighttime Image Enhancement and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01334/) (2023)
- [Producing and Leveraging Online Map Uncertainty in Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16439/) (2024)
- [MMFN: Multi-Modal-Fusion-Net for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00186/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Surface Normal Constraint for Geometric Estimation from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05869/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00603/) (2025)
- [ReasonPlan: Unified Scene Prediction and Decision Reasoning for Closed-loop Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20024/) (2025)
- [WorldRFT: Latent World Model Planning with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19133/) (2025)
- [TakeAD: Preference-based Post-optimization for End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Expert Takeover Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17370/) (2025)
- [WPT: World-to-Policy Transfer via Online World Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20095/) (2025)
- [FlowAD: Ego-Scene Interactive Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13399/) (2026)
- [Mimir: Hierarchical Goal-Driven Diffusion with Uncertainty Propagation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07130/) (2025)
- [UniUncer: Unified Dynamic Static Uncertainty for End to End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07686/) (2026)
- [SUPER-AD: Semantic Uncertainty-aware Planning for End-to-End Robust Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22865/) (2025)
- [Unified Prediction and Planning via Conflict-Aware Disjoint Parameter Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19971/) (2026)
- [GSDrive: Reinforcing Driving Policies by Multi-mode Future Trajectory Probing with 3D Gaussian Splatting Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28111/) (2026)
- [ConsistencyPlanner: Real-time Planning with Fast-Sampling Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11569/) (2026)
- [PrismAD: Decoupled Planning via Semantic Mixture-of-Planners for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10336/) (2026)
- [VIPS: Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Planning Benchmark via Pseudo-Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02462/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to produce planning trajectories from raw sensors directly. Currently, most approaches integrate perception, prediction, and planning modules into a fully differentiable network, promising great scalability. However, these methods typically rely on deterministic modeling of online maps in the perception module for guiding or constraining vehicle planning, which may incorporate erroneous perception information and further compromise planning safety. To address this issue, we delve into the importance of online map uncertainty for enhancing autonomous driving safety and propose a novel paradigm named UncAD. Specifically, UncAD first estimates the uncertainty of the online map in the perception module. It then leverages the uncertainty to guide motion prediction and planning modules to produce multi-modal trajectories. Finally, to achieve safer autonomous driving, UncAD proposes an uncertainty-collision-aware planning selection strategy according to the online map uncertainty to evaluate and select the best trajectory. In this study, we incorporate UncAD into various state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end methods. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that integrating UncAD, with only a 1.9% increase in parameters, can reduce collision rates by up to 26% and drivable area conflict rate by up to 42%. Codes, pre-trained models, and demo videos can be accessed at https://github.com/pengxuanyang/UncAD.