CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

Abstract:End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2606.14438 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.14438v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14438 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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