Autonomous driving technology has advanced significantly with deep learning, but noise and attacks threaten its real-world deployment. While research has revealed vulnerabilities in individual intelligent tasks, a comprehensive evaluation of these impacts across complete end-to-end systems is still underexplored. To address this void, we thoroughly analyze the robustness of four end-to-end autonomous driving systems against various noise and build the RobustE2E Benchmark, including five traditional adversarial attacks and a newly proposed Module-Wise Attack specifically targeting end-to-end autonomous driving in white-box settings, as well as four major categories of natural corruptions (a total of 17 types, with five severity levels) in black-box settings. Additionally, we extend the robustness evaluation from the open-loop model level to the closed-loop case studies of autonomous driving system level. Our comprehensive evaluation and analysis provide valuable insights into the robustness of end-to-end autonomous driving, which may offer potential guidance for targeted improvements to models. For example, (1) even the most advanced end-to-end models suffer large planning failures under minor perturbations, with perception tasks showing the most substantial decline; (2) among adversarial attacks, our Module-Wise Attack poses the greatest threat to end-to-end autonomous driving models, while PGD- is the weakest, and among four categories of natural corruptions, noise and weather are the most harmful, followed by blur and digital distortion being less severe; (3) the integrated, multitask approach results in significantly higher robustness and reliability compared with the simpler design, highlighting the critical role of collaborative multitask in autonomous driving; and (4) the autonomous driving systems amplify the model’s lack of robustness, etc. Our research contributes to developing more resilient autonomous driving models and their deployment in the real world.
The rapid progress of generative AI has enabled remarkable creative capabilities, yet it also raises urgent concerns regarding the safety of AI-generated visual content in real-world applications such as content moderation, platform governance, and digital media regulation. This includes unsafe material such as sexually explicit images, violent scenes, hate symbols, propaganda, and unauthorized imitations of copyrighted artworks. Existing image safety systems often rely on rigid category filters and produce binary outputs, lacking the capacity to interpret context or reason about nuanced, adversarially induced forms of harm. In addition, standard evaluation metrics (e.g., attack success rate) fail to capture the semantic severity and dynamic progression of toxicity. To address these limitations, we propose Perception–Retrieval–Judgement (PRJ), a cognitively inspired framework that models toxicity detection as a structured reasoning process. PRJ follows a three-stage design: it first transforms an image into descriptive language (perception), then retrieves external knowledge related to harm categories and traits (retrieval), and finally evaluates toxicity based on legal or normative rules (judgement). This language-centric structure enables the system to detect both explicit and implicit harms with improved interpretability and categorical granularity. In addition, we introduce a dynamic scoring mechanism based on a contextual toxicity risk matrix to quantify harmfulness across different semantic dimensions. Experiments show that PRJ surpasses existing safety checkers in detection accuracy and robustness while uniquely supporting structured category-level toxicity interpretation.