Collision Risk Estimation via Loss Prediction in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Collision risk estimation and avoidance play central roles in the safety of autonomous driving (AD) systems. Recently emerged end-to-end AD systems gain collision avoidance ability by minimizing losses to penalize planning trajectories that are too close to other objects. Despite a significant collision rate during testing, most end-to-end planners do not explicitly quantify the collision risk in their outputs. To address this, we introduce RiskMonitor, an efficient plug-and-play module that interprets planning and motion tokens from state-of-the-art end-to-end planners to estimate collision risk. Inspired by loss prediction based uncertainty quantification, RiskMonitor predicts whether the collision loss -- commonly adopted to train end-to-end planners -- is positive along planned waypoints, framing collision risk estimation as a binary classification task. We evaluate RiskMonitor on the real-world nuScenes dataset (open-loop) and the neural-rendering based simulator, NeuroNCAP (closed-loop). Our token-driven method outperforms prediction-driven approaches, including deterministic rules, Gaussian mixture models, and Monte Carlo Dropout. When integrated with a simple braking policy, RiskMonitor improves collision avoidance ability by $66.5\%$ in a closed-loop test on safety-critical scenarios. These results demonstrate that monitoring collision risk using plan and motion tokens enhances the safety of end-to-end AD without retraining it.