arXiv:2605.07549cs.CVcs.LG2026-05

用置信区间量化目标检测不确定性,提升安全关键场景下的可靠性。

Probabilistic Object Detection with Conformal Prediction

论文配图:Probabilistic Object Detection with Conformal Prediction
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 对边界框坐标逐点做校准预测,结合贝尼弗尼修正保证框级覆盖率。
  • 引入预测不确定性自适应缩放,使低置信度预测区间更紧凑,最高提升19%重叠率。
  • 适用于自动驾驶等实时场景,尤其适合需精准不确定度估计的系统。

置信校准(Conformal Prediction, CP)是一种无需分布假设的方法,可在有限样本下提供预测集合的边际覆盖保证,适用于安全关键的目标检测中的不确定性量化。然而,目标检测涉及结构化的多输出预测,使得经典针对单输出设计的CP理论难以直接应用。此外,标准未缩放的CP在所有输入上生成固定宽度的预测区间,导致低不确定性预测的冗余宽度过大。尽管缩放版CP可通过输入相关的不确定性估计调节区间宽度,但此前研究尚未系统比较未缩放与缩放CP在多类别目标检测中的表现,也未将其与互补的不确定性量化方法结合。本文填补该空白:(i) 对边界框四个角点坐标分别应用CP,并使用贝尼弗尼校正实现框级覆盖保证;(ii) 利用概率检测器训练时损失衰减得到的每预测结果的随机不确定性估计,对结果进行缩放,在未经校准及两种校准变体下评估;(iii) 扩展为两步流程:先用RAPS构建类别预测集,再将校准后的边界框条件化于预测类别集。在三个自动驾驶数据集(KITTI、BDD、CODA)上,包括分布偏移下的跨域设置,缩放版CP始终优于未缩放版本,最大提高19%的交并比(IoU),降低39%的区间得分,且不牺牲覆盖率。类别校准进一步提升覆盖率,对尖锐性影响极小。整体显著提升了实时真实世界目标检测中可操作的不确定性估计能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Conformal Prediction (CP) is a distribution-free method for constructing prediction sets with marginal finite-sample coverage guarantees, making it a suitable framework for reliable uncertainty quantification in safety-critical object detection. However, object detection introduces structured multi-output predictions, complicating the application of classical CP theory developed for single outputs. In addition, standard, unscaled CP produces fixed-width prediction intervals across inputs, leading to unnecessary width for low-uncertainty predictions. While scaled CP addresses this by adapting the interval width to an input-dependent uncertainty estimate, prior work has neither systematically compared unscaled and scaled CP for multi-class object detection, nor integrated CP with a complementary uncertainty quantification method in this setting. We fill this gap by: (i) applying CP coordinate-wise to bounding box corners with a Bonferroni correction for box-level guarantees; (ii) scaling the resulting intervals using per-prediction aleatoric uncertainty estimates derived from a probabilistic object detector trained with loss attenuation, evaluated in uncalibrated and two calibrated variants; (iii) extending to a two-step pipeline that constructs prediction sets for the class using RAPS and conditions the conformalized bounding boxes on the predicted class set. Across three autonomous driving datasets (KITTI, BDD, CODA), including a cross-domain setting under distribution shift, scaled CP consistently improves interval sharpness over unscaled CP, achieving up to 19% higher IoU and 39% lower interval scores, without sacrificing coverage. Class-wise calibration further improves coverage for both variants with a negligible effect on sharpness. Together, these improvements yield more actionable uncertainty estimates for real-time, real-world object detection.

目标检测不确定性置信校准自动驾驶

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。