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.
By Steffen Hagedorn, Aron Distelzweig, Alexandru P. Condurache
arXiv:2606. 06423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety-critical traffic scenario generation is essential for evaluating autonomous driving systems under rare but high-risk interactions.
By Qi Lan, Yining Tang, Yu Shen, Yi Zhou, Yuhao Wei, Jie Li, Guofa Li
The paper presents a training-free diffusion-based motion planner that replaces learned global trajectory scores with analytical local scores derived from obstacle, smoothness, velocity, and inter-agent feasibility terms. By reconstructing trajectory scores through local interactions between neighboring waypoints and nearby constraints, the method decomposes the denoising process while preserving the optimization structure of classical trajectory methods. Experiments demonstrate that this approach generates smooth, feasible trajectories for large multi-agent tasks in complex environments quickly, outperforming learning-based and optimization baselines without requiring training data.
By Michael Y. Fatemi, Jinhao Liang, Ferdinando Fioretto
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:2606. 11019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based motion planners, despite recent progress, often suffer from temporal inconsistency.
By Zehan Zhang, Neng Zhang, Yaoyi Li, Jia Cai, Zhiling Wang
arXiv:2607. 18637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generating closed-loop traffic scenarios that are both realistic and controllable is crucial for evaluating autonomous driving systems, especially under rare safety-critical interactions.
By Jingzheng Li, Yufei Ge, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Zizhe Wang, Binhang Qi, Bing Li, Keyu Chen, Baochang Zhang, Xianglong Liu, Philip S Yu
arXiv:2609.39995v2 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Diffusion planners exhibit strong capabilities in generating multimodal trajectories. However, existing methods primarily rely on expert demonstrations...
By Jiaxi Ye, Chunji Lv, Guoren Wang, Changsheng Li
arXiv:2607. 18200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots in cluttered indoor spaces often fail not because they cannot generate collision-free paths, but because a fixed safety margin is mis-calibrated: conservative margins cause detours and timeouts, while permissive margins lead to near-boundary shortcuts under perception bias.
By Junyi Hu, Shuaihang Yuan, Geeta Chandra Raju Bethala, Anthony Tzes, Yi Fang
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
Learning-based motion planners, despite recent progress, often suffer from temporal inconsistency. Small perturbations across frames can accumulate into unstable trajectories, degrading comfort and safety in closed-loop driving.
arXiv:2606. 15359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for planning and control by learning multimodal distributions over actions and trajectories.
By Paolo Giaretta, Zeyang Li, Navid Azizan
arXiv:2606. 27766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning enables policy learning from fixed datasets without additional environment interaction, making it appealing for safety-critical applications where online exploration is costly or unsafe.
By Shiqiang Gong