When Does Corruption Break the Plan? A Degradation-Tolerance Benchmark for Camera-Only End-to-End Driving

Robustness is a critical requirement for deploying autonomous driving systems in the real world. Existing robustness benchmarks for autonomous driving have made important progress in studying the effects of image-level corruptions, such as adverse weather or camera degradation, on perception modules and open-loop planning outputs. However, deployment can also involve system-level imperfections, such as inference latency and ego-state estimation errors, which remain less studied in closed-loop E2E-AD evaluation. These imperfections can accumulate through the feedback loop and destabilize control. In this work, we present Bench2Drive-Robust, to our knowledge the first device-centric robustness benchmark for closed-loop end-to-end autonomous driving under realistic deployment perturbations. We systematically evaluate deployment-oriented perturbations arising from three major sources: camera-stream failures (frame drop, partial observation), ego-state estimation errors (GPS noise, and speed or odometry errors), and compute-induced control delay (model inference delay). We evaluate representative end-to-end driving methods and analyze their robustness under different perturbation severities. Our results show that these deployment-related perturbations can substantially degrade closed-loop driving performance, revealing robustness challenges that are not fully captured by conventional image-level corruption evaluations. By establishing a closed-loop evaluation protocol and demonstrating the substantial impact of these deployment-oriented perturbations, Bench2Drive-Robust defines practical robustness problems for end-to-end autonomous driving and encourages further research on deployment-aware robust driving systems.

DRIVE-C is a controlled corruption dataset designed to evaluate visual perception robustness in autonomous driving systems. It is built from real-world forward-facing driving videos collected across daytime, nighttime, urban, rural, freeway, and parking environments. Clean clips are anonymized via localized face and license plate blurring, then transformed with physics-inspired synthetic degradations. The dataset contains 10 clean clips and 600 corrupted clips spanning 12 camera degradation types across five severity levels, with per-clip metadata and Global Sensor Health Index (GSHI) annotations. DRIVE-C supports robustness benchmarking, degradation-aware modeling, uncertainty estimation, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, and sensor health monitoring for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). By providing pixel-aligned clean and degraded video clips with fully reproducible corruption parameters, DRIVE-C offers a structured testbed for studying perception reliability under controlled camera degradation.

End-to-end multimodal driving has progressed rapidly by fusing camera and LiDAR streams. Existing pipelines remain fragile under asymmetric sensor degradation, where either an entire modality or only a localized region is corrupted while other regions remain useful. The key difficulty is not simply to add an uncertainty head, but to obtain dense reliability supervision, calibrate this reliability against physical fault severity, and use it before unreliable features bias the planner. We propose Variance-Guided Spatial Attention Fusion (VG-SAF), in which dense heteroscedastic reliability estimates act as interpretable spatial gates. The framework couples three components. First, a physically grounded augmentor simulates representative camera and LiDAR failures and emits a continuous spatial mask, providing dense supervision without additional annotation. Second, modality-specific experts predict per-pixel reliability scales through cross-branch dense distillation in log space, enforcing a monotone severity-to-scale response. Third, calibrated reliability maps drive a hybrid attention mechanism that suppresses unreliable cells with a local spatial gate and arbitrates between modalities through a cross-modal trust softmax. A Laplace uncertainty head emits a systemic waypoint uncertainty scale that signals severe or combined sensor degradation, including severities outside the training ranges. On the CARLA Longest6 benchmark, VG-SAF consistently improves closed-loop robustness over the baselines across camera-only, LiDAR-only, and joint degradation regimes, as measured by driving score, route completion, and infraction score.