Estimating Semantic Ambiguity via Gaussian Context Distributions for VLM-Driven Traversability Analysis

Abstract:Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments requires robust scene understanding, yet Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often suffer from semantic ambiguity, where conflicting predictions can lead to dangerous failures. To address this, we present a novel pipeline for vision-based traversability estimation that explicitly models contextual uncertainty. Our approach utilizes Conceptual Anchoring to ground open-vocabulary VLM predictions onto a continuous physical traversability scale. By formulating the model's responses as a Gaussian Context Distribution (GCD), we derive both a dense traversability map and a dense uncertainty map based on the statistical properties of the distribution. Experimental validation on the real-world GOOSE dataset demonstrates that our proposed uncertainty metric effectively correlates with sources of ambiguity, such as visual artifacts and mixed terrain overlap. The method exhibits competitive performance while offering the distinct advantage of providing statistical uncertainty estimates to address semantic ambiguity, enabling safer and more reliable autonomous behavior in complex outdoor settings.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.08583 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.08583v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08583 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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