  End-to-end learning has emerged as a major paradigm for developing autonomous
systems. Unfortunately, with its performance and convenience comes an even
greater challenge of safety assurance. A key factor of this challenge is the
absence of the notion of a low-dimensional and interpretable dynamical state,
around which traditional assurance methods revolve. Focusing on the online
safety prediction problem, this paper proposes a configurable family of
learning pipelines based on generative world models, which do not require
low-dimensional states. To implement these pipelines, we overcome the
challenges of learning safety-informed latent representations and missing
safety labels under prediction-induced distribution shift. These pipelines come
with statistical calibration guarantees on their safety chance predictions
based on conformal prediction. We perform an extensive evaluation of the
proposed learning pipelines on two case studies of image-controlled systems: a
racing car and a cartpole.
