# ObjectTransforms for Uncertainty Quantification and Reduction in Vision-Based Perception for Autonomous Vehicles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16118 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16118/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Better Aggregation in Test-Time Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11156/) (2020)
- [Learning by Transduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.7375/) (2013)
- [Gaussian YOLOv3: An Accurate and Fast Object Detector Using Localization Uncertainty for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04620/) (2019)
- [Paint by Inpaint: Learning to Add Image Objects by Removing Them First](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18212/) (2024)
- [ObjectAug: Object-level Data Augmentation for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00221/) (2021)
- [An Uncertainty Estimation Framework for Probabilistic Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15007/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable perception is fundamental for safety critical decision making in autonomous driving. Yet, vision based object detector neural networks remain vulnerable to uncertainty arising from issues such as data bias and distributional shifts. In this paper, we introduce ObjectTransforms, a technique for quantifying and reducing uncertainty in vision based object detection through object specific transformations at both training and inference times. At training time, ObjectTransforms perform color space perturbations on individual objects, improving robustness to lighting and color variations. ObjectTransforms also uses diffusion models to generate realistic, diverse pedestrian instances. At inference time, object perturbations are applied to detected objects and the variance of detection scores are used to quantify predictive uncertainty in real time. This uncertainty signal is then used to filter out false positives and also recover false negatives, improving the overall precision recall curve. Experiments with YOLOv8 on the NuImages 10K dataset demonstrate that our method yields notable accuracy improvements and uncertainty reduction across all object classes during training, while predicting desirably higher uncertainty values for false positives as compared to true positives during inference. Our results highlight the potential of ObjectTransforms as a lightweight yet effective mechanism for reducing and quantifying uncertainty in vision-based perception during training and inference respectively.