# Risk-Aware Occupancy for Safety-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21470/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2026.

## 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)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Tri-Perspective View for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07817/) (2023)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [VoxFormer: Sparse Voxel Transformer for Camera-based 3D Semantic Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12251/) (2023)
- [OccFormer: Dual-path Transformer for Vision-based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05316/) (2023)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16038/) (2023)
- [FB-OCC: 3D Occupancy Prediction based on Forward-Backward View Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01492/) (2023)
- [GaussianFormer: Scene as Gaussians for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17429/) (2024)
- [SelfOcc: Self-Supervised Vision-Based 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12754/) (2023)
- [PanoOcc: Unified Occupancy Representation for Camera-based 3D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10013/) (2023)
- [FlashOcc: Fast and Memory-Efficient Occupancy Prediction via Channel-to-Height Plugin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12058/) (2023)
- [SparseOcc: Rethinking Sparse Latent Representation for Vision-Based Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09502/) (2024)
- [OccLLaMA: An Occupancy-Language-Action Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03272/) (2024)
- [FastOcc: Accelerating 3D Occupancy Prediction by Fusing the 2D Bird's-Eye View and Perspective View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02710/) (2024)
- [Efficient Deformable ConvNets: Rethinking Dynamic and Sparse Operator for Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06197/) (2024)
- [OctreeOcc: Efficient and Multi-Granularity Occupancy Prediction Using Octree Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03774/) (2023)
- [Driving on Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05083/) (2026)
- [OccNeRF: Advancing 3D Occupancy Prediction in LiDAR-Free Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09243/) (2023)
- [ViewFormer: Exploring Spatiotemporal Modeling for Multi-View 3D Occupancy Perception via View-Guided Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04299/) (2024)
- [UniOcc: Unifying Vision-Centric 3D Occupancy Prediction with Geometric and Semantic Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09117/) (2023)
- [ProtoOcc: Accurate, Efficient 3D Occupancy Prediction Using Dual Branch Encoder-Prototype Query Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08774/) (2024)
- [OccVLA: Vision-Language-Action Model with Implicit 3D Occupancy Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05578/) (2025)
- [Deep Height Decoupling for Precise Vision-based 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07972/) (2024)
- [OccProphet: Pushing Efficiency Frontier of Camera-Only 4D Occupancy Forecasting with Observer-Forecaster-Refiner Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15180/) (2025)
- [OccTransformer: Improving BEVFormer for 3D camera-only occupancy prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18140/) (2024)
- [MambaOcc: Visual State Space Model for BEV-based Occupancy Prediction with Local Adaptive Reordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11464/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional end-to-end driving systems model the environment with sparse objects and lane elements. While efficient, this paradigm discards planning-critical information in crowded and occluded scenarios, particularly for unstructured obstacles, ambiguous free space, and complex interactions. We propose risk-aware occupancy, a dense BEV representation that explicitly fuses geometric occupancy, map-derived traffic constraints, and future dynamic-agent occupancy as complementary risk signals. Built upon this representation, we develop ROIDrive, an instance-centric end-to-end framework with a dedicated risk-aware occupancy branch. The predicted occupancy is tokenized via sliding-window sampling and injected into planning queries via cross-attention, while temporal query consistency mitigates unreliable flickering queries. We also contribute RiskOcc4D-nuScenes, a benchmark derived from nuScenes and Occ3D-nuScenes with four automated annotation pipelines for multi-dimensional risk supervision. Experiments on representative occupancy architectures verify the learnability and transferability of our representation. Integrated with GenAD, it reduces collision rates by 35.0% (UniAD metric) and 52.9% (ST-P3 metric), confirming the efficacy of the proposed representation modality.