Weather Adaptive Autonomous Driving

Nicholas Taylor, Alexander Picon, Sudip Dhakal

Camera object detectors lose recall in rain, fog, snow and sand, and the confidence threshold at which a detector is deployed decides how many objects it misses and how many false alarms it raises. We study how a frozen detector should make this decision in adverse weather. We first reproduce SeqCRC, a conformal object detector whose first step calibrates the confidence threshold by conformal risk control (CRC), and use that step, calibrated separately in each weather condition, as our baseline. With YOLOv8x it keeps the held-out miss fraction within a 20% budget in every DAWN weather bin, where a single global threshold fails in fog, but the false alarms it needs are an output rather than a choice: from 1.6 to 117 per image across DAWN and BDD100K conditions. We then propose a calibrated trade-off dial. One setting, $λ$, the number of false alarms accepted to avoid one missed object, selects the expected-cost-optimal decision rule: either one score threshold, or a per-detection rule that keeps a box when its calibrated probability of being a real object, estimated by gradient-boosted trees from the detector's own per-box outputs, is at least $1/(1+λ)$. F-score preferences map…