Modern autonomous systems rely on perception modules to process complex sensor measurements into state estimates. These estimates are then passed to a controller, which uses them to make safety-critical decisions. It is therefore important that we design perception systems to minimize errors that reduce the overall safety of the system. We develop a risk-driven approach to designing perception systems that accounts for the effect of perceptual errors on the performance of the fully-integrated, closed-loop system. We formulate a risk function to quantify the effect of a given perceptual error on overall safety, and show how we can use it to design safer perception systems by including a risk-dependent term in the loss function and generating training data in risk-sensitive regions. We evaluate our techniques on a realistic vision-based aircraft detect and avoid application and show that risk-driven design reduces collision risk by 37% over a baseline system.

We develop a risk-driven approach to designing perception systems that accounts for the effect of perceptual errors on the performance of the fully-integrated, closed-loop system.

Finally, we implement a fully-integrated, closed-loop simulator of the vision-based detect-and-avoid problem to evaluate trained models with respect to the downstream collision avoidance task. This benchmark will enable further research in the design of robust machine learning systems for use in safety-critical applications.

Full verification of learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPS) has long been intractable due to challenges including black-box components and complex real-world environments. Existing tools either provide formal guarantees for limited types of systems or test the system as a monolith, but no general framework exists for compositional analysis of learning-enabled CPS using varied verification techniques over complex real-world environments. This paper introduces ScenicProver, a verification framework that aims to fill this gap. Built upon the Scenic probabilistic programming language, the framework supports: (1) compositional system description with clear component interfaces, ranging from interpretable code to black boxes; (2) assume-guarantee contracts over those components using an extension of Linear Temporal Logic containing arbitrary Scenic expressions; (3) evidence generation through testing, formal proofs via Lean 4 integration, and importing external assumptions; (4) systematic combination of generated evidence using contract operators; and (5) automatic generation of assurance cases tracking the provenance of system-level guarantees. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness through a case study on an autonomous vehicle's automatic emergency braking system with sensor fusion. By leveraging manufacturer guarantees for radar and laser sensors and focusing testing efforts on uncertain conditions, our approach enables stronger probabilistic guarantees than monolithic testing with the same computational budget.

Abstract--Autonomous driving is an emerging technology that is expected to bring significant social, economic, and environmental benefits. However, these benefits come with rising energy consumption by computation engines, limiting the driving range of vehicles, especially electric ones. Perception computing is typically the most power-intensive component, as it relies on large-scale deep learning models to extract environmental features. Recently, numerous studies have employed model compression techniques, such as sparsification, quantization, and distillation, to reduce computational consumption. However, these methods often result in either a substantial model size or a significant drop in perception accuracy compared to high-computation models. T o address these challenges, we propose an energy-efficient autonomous driving framework, called EneAD, which includes an adaptive perception and a robust decision module. In the adaptive perception module, a perception optimization strategy is designed from the perspective of data management and tuning. Firstly, we manage multiple perception models with different computational consumption and adjust the execution framerate dynamically. Then, we define them as knobs and design a transferable tuning method based on Bayesian optimization to identify promising knob values that achieve low computation while maintaining desired accuracy. T o adaptively switch the knob values in various traffic scenarios, a lightweight classification model is proposed to distinguish the perception difficulty in different scenarios. In the robust decision module, we propose a decision model based on reinforcement learning and design a regularization term to enhance driving stability in the face of perturbed perception results. EneAD can reduce perception consumption by 1.9 to 3.5 and thus improve driving range by 3.9% to 8.5%. Autonomous driving has gained broad attention from the public during the last few years [1], [2]. With intelligence, the autonomous vehicle can have a more comprehensive perception of the surrounding traffic environment and make more reasonable driving decisions compared to human drivers. As a result, it is expected to bring society a large number of benefits, including improved mobility and a significant reduction in collisions. For example, the computing platform using the Nvidia AGX Orin SoC [4] has a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 800W . These power demands can also increase the thermal demands on a vehicle's climate-control system.

Abstract--This survey provides an analysis of current methodologies integrating legal and logical specifications into the perception, prediction, and planning modules of automated driving systems. We systematically explore techniques ranging from logic-based frameworks to computational legal reasoning approaches, emphasizing their capability to ensure regulatory compliance and interpretability in dynamic and uncertain driving environments. A central finding is that significant challenges arise at the intersection of perceptual reliability, legal compliance, and decision-making justifiability. T o systematically analyze these challenges, we introduce a taxonomy categorizing existing approaches by their theoretical foundations, architectural implementations, and validation strategies. We particularly focus on methods that address perceptual uncertainty and incorporate explicit legal norms, facilitating decisions that are both technically robust and legally defensible. The review covers neural-symbolic integration methods for perception, logic-driven rule representation, and norm-aware prediction strategies, all contributing toward transparent and accountable autonomous vehicle operation. We highlight critical open questions and practical trade-offs that must be addressed, offering multidisci-plinary insights from engineering, logic, and law to guide future developments in legally compliant autonomous driving systems.

The driving environment perception has a vital role for autonomous driving and nowadays has been actively explored for its realization. The research community and relevant stakeholders necessitate the development of Deep Learning (DL) models and AI-enabled solutions to enhance autonomous vehicles (AVs) for smart mobility. There is a need to develop a model that accurately perceives multiple objects on the road and predicts the driver's perception to control the car's movements. This article proposes a novel utility-based analytical model that enables perception systems of AVs to understand the driving environment. The article consists of modules: acquiring a custom dataset having distinctive objects, i.e., motorcyclists, rickshaws, etc; a DL-based model (YOLOv8s) for object detection; and a module to measure the utility of perception service from the performance values of trained model instances. The perception model is validated based on the object detection task, and its process is benchmarked by state-of-the-art deep learning models' performance metrics from the nuScense dataset. The experimental results show three best-performing YOLOv8s instances based on mAP@0.5 values, i.e., SGD-based (0.832), Adam-based (0.810), and AdamW-based (0.822). However, the AdamW-based model (i.e., car: 0.921, motorcyclist: 0.899, truck: 0.793, etc.) still outperforms the SGD-based model (i.e., car: 0.915, motorcyclist: 0.892, truck: 0.781, etc.) because it has better class-level performance values, confirmed by the proposed perception model. We validate that the proposed function is capable of finding the right perception for AVs. The results above encourage using the proposed perception model to evaluate the utility of learning models and determine the appropriate perception for AVs.