A Degradation-Tolerance Benchmark for Camera-Only End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2608.29005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera-only end-to-end (E2E) driving models are nearing deployment, where the camera stream is degraded by blur, noise, low light, weather, frame loss, and memory faults. How much a policy tolerates before its driving breaks is unclear. Corruption-robustness benchmarks target detection or bird's-eye-view perception, not the planning output that drives the car. We present DriveDegrade, a benchmark for image-degradation tolerance in camera-only E2E driving. Sixteen corruption families at five severities are injected on the fly inside the image loader, one operator reaching fifteen policies, and we evaluate open-loop planning on nuScenes and NAVSIM plus a CARLA closed-loop anchor. First, mild degradation barely affects planning, and the families that break it have a clear threshold at mid severity. Second, fragility is corruption-dependent: blur, JPEG, and raindrop damage planning most, while weather and bit error are tolerated far into the range. Third, a flat curve is ambiguous, so we separate corruptions that degrade the image from those that remove it. A planner that reads its camera must lose accuracy when information is deleted, whatever it does under quality loss. On these two axes the planners separate sharply, quantifying the ego-status shortcut without mistaking indifference for robustness. A released vision-language-action planner is flat on both axes, and blinding all six of its cameras costs it only 11.5 percent.

Abstract:Camera-only end-to-end (E2E) driving models are nearing deployment, where the camera stream is degraded by blur, noise, low light, weather, frame loss, and memory faults. How much a policy tolerates before its driving breaks is unclear. Corruption-robustness benchmarks target detection or bird's-eye-view perception, not the planning output that drives the car. We present DriveDegrade, a benchmark for image-degradation tolerance in camera-only E2E driving. Sixteen corruption families at five severities are injected on the fly inside the image loader, one operator reaching fifteen policies, and we evaluate open-loop planning on nuScenes and NAVSIM plus a CARLA closed-loop anchor. First, mild degradation barely affects planning, and the families that break it have a clear threshold at mid severity. Second, fragility is corruption-dependent: blur, JPEG, and raindrop damage planning most, while weather and bit error are tolerated far into the range. Third, a flat curve is ambiguous, so we separate corruptions that degrade the image from those that remove it. A planner that reads its camera must lose accuracy when information is deleted, whatever it does under quality loss. On these two axes the planners separate sharply, quantifying the ego-status shortcut without mistaking indifference for robustness. A released vision-language-action planner is flat on both axes, and blinding all six of its cameras costs it only 11.5 percent.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.29005 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.29005v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29005 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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A Degradation-Tolerance Benchmark for Camera-Only End-to-End Driving

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