Can Attribution Predict Risk? From Multi-View Attribution to Planning Risk Signals in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical attribution framework for end-to-end autonomous driving models, linking attribution maps to planning risk signals and demonstrating their effectiveness in risk prediction and generalization.

Contribution

It develops a coarse-to-fine region attribution method and extracts novel attribution statistics that predict planning risks in autonomous driving.

Findings

Attribution entropy correlates with trajectory error (Spearman 0.30).

Cross-camera Gini coefficient predicts collision risk (AUROC 0.77).

Risk signals generalize well to new scenes with minimal performance loss.

Abstract

End-to-end autonomous driving models generate future trajectories from multi-view inputs, improving system integration but introducing opaque decisions and hard-to-localize risks. Existing methods either rely on auxiliary monitoring models or generate textual explanations, but are decoupled from the planning process and fail to reveal the visual evidence underlying trajectory generation. While attribution offers a direct alternative, planning differs from image classification by taking six-view camera images as input and predicting continuous multi-step trajectories, requiring attribution to capture both critical views and regions and their influence on outputs. Moreover, whether attribution maps can support risk identification remains underexplored. To address this, we propose a hierarchical attribution framework for end-to-end planning. Specifically, using L2 consistency with the original trajectory as the objective, we design a coarse-to-fine region attribution strategy that searches candidate regions across the full six-view input and refines attribution within them. We further extract three attribution statistics as predictive signals for planning risk, including attribution entropy to measure how concentrated the planner's reliance is over the joint visual space, within-camera spatial variance to characterize how spread out the attribution is within each view, and cross-camera Gini coefficient to quantify how unevenly attribution is distributed across the six cameras. Experiments on BridgeAD, UniAD, and GenAD show that these statistics correlate with planning risk, achieving Spearman correlations of $0.30 \pm 0.07$ with trajectory error and AUROC of $0.77 \pm 0.04$ for collision detection. The signal generalizes to held-out scenes with negligible degradation and remains stable under an alternative attribution baseline.