arXiv AI

DiffuSearch: How Hybrid Trajectory Planning Benefits from Aligned Objectives in Diffusion and Action Space

DiffuSearch is a hybrid trajectory planner for autonomous driving that unifies objectives across both generation and refinement stages. It first uses a guided diffusion model to produce scene-consistent joint trajectories, then refines them with a Monte Carlo Tree Search that shares the same driving goals—collision avoidance, drivable area compliance, comfort, and progress. Experiments on nuPlan and interPlan benchmarks show that this synergy reduces collisions and improves comfort, especially in complex interactive scenarios.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

One Diffusion Model, Two Roles: Guided Trajectory Planning and Safety-Critical Scenario Generation in Closed-Loop Simulation

The paper presents a single pretrained diffusion traffic model that serves both as an ego motion planner and as a controllable generator of safety‑critical scenarios for autonomous driving. It introduces a Single‑Stream Dual‑Stream diffusion‑transformer decoder (SSDS) that fuses scene context via joint attention, improving closed‑loop performance on the nuPlan benchmark, and a training‑free guidance scheme called Decoupled Annealing Posterior Sampling with Energy (DAPSE) that injects arbitrary energy functions at inference time. Using the same model, the authors generate realistic long‑tail driving interactions—such as aggressive cut‑ins and lead‑vehicle braking—through inference‑time guidance, exposing failure modes in black‑box planners that standard benchmarks miss.

By Arka Pal, Rajesh Kumar, Hannes Eriksson, R\'emi Lacombe, Arvid Laveno Ling, Ankit Gupta, Maciej Wozniak
arXiv AI
Aug 3

RAPiD: Reward-Guided Consistency Distillation of Diffusion Planners for Real-Time Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2602. 07339v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based trajectory planners can model multi-modal driving behavior, but their iterative denoising process introduces a latency bottleneck for real-time closed-loop deployment.

By Ruturaj Reddy, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Junn Yong Loo, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Ganesh Krishnasamy
arXiv AI
Sep 3

CrashDiffuser: VLM-Guided Collision Intent Reasoning for Fine-Grained Safety-Critical Traffic Scenario Generation

CrashDiffuser is a closed-loop VLM‑guided diffusion framework designed for fine‑grained safety‑critical traffic scenario generation. It separates semantic collision reasoning from trajectory synthesis via a hierarchical collision‑intent interface that specifies target contact regions (head, rear, or side). The system uses a vision‑language model to extract scene context and predict structured action tuples, which condition a diffusion model to produce executable adversarial trajectories, achieving high target‑collision and contact‑region control rates on WOMD‑derived scenarios.

By Shucheng Zhang, Yuang Zhang, Bingzhang Wang, Muhammad Monjurul Karim, Kehua Chen, Yinhai Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 20

DA-WAM: Decision-Aligned Future Latents for Driving World Models

DA‑WAM is a framework that integrates predictive representation learning, action‑conditioned future modeling, and trajectory scoring into a single decision‑making objective for autonomous driving. It uses an online encoder with a stable momentum target to keep future representations aligned with the driving task, generating a distinct future latent for each trajectory candidate. A future‑latent‑conditioned scorer evaluates these latents, with expert‑matched trajectories supervised by observed futures and safety‑critical hard negatives providing additional guidance, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on NAVSIM‑v1 and NAVSIM‑v2.

By Ruiguo Zhong, Benshan Ma, Xiaolong Chen, Lang Zhang, Mingyue Feng, Yaonong Wang, Pei Liu, Jun Ma