The paper presents a comparative study of motion planning methods from major autonomous driving benchmarks—CARLA, nuPlan, and the Waymo Open Dataset—using CARLA Leaderboard v2.1 as a unified evaluation platform. Eight representative planners (TF++, InterFuser, TCP, PDM‑Lite, MTR+MPC, CaRL, PlanT 2.0, Diffusion planner) are evaluated to highlight their strengths, weaknesses, prevailing trends, and common challenges in motion planning research.
By Merve Atasever, Alfredo Reina Corona, Zhuochen Liu, Qingpei Li, Akshay Hitendra Shah, Hans Walker, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh, Rahul Jain
arXiv:2508. 16947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite significant progress, imitation learning-based autonomous driving planners remain largely restricted to reproducing high-frequency biased behaviors, overlooking the inherent behavioral diversity of human driving.
By Fan Ding, Xuewen Luo, Fucai Ke, Hwa Hui Tew, Susilawati Susilawati, Vishnu Monn Baskaran, Junn Yong Loo
arXiv:2601.01762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes....
By Yanhao Wu, Haoyang Zhang, Fei He, Rui Wu, Yanhu Shan, Congpei Qiu, Liang Gao, Wei Ke, Tong Zhang
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
The paper introduces Anticipatory Generative Modeling, a new graph-constrained approach for generating road‑network trajectories that focuses on behavior modeling rather than simple location simulation. It presents Foresight, a probabilistic model that iteratively anticipates, selects, updates, and re‑anticipates future transitions to produce realistic routes that stay on the road network. Experiments show that Foresight outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art generative methods.
By Zhenhao Huang, Li Sun, Philip S. Yu
arXiv:2606. 06014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models (LWMs) have strengthened end-to-end autonomous driving by forecasting compact scene dynamics for downstream planning.
By Xiaoyun Qiu, Jingtao He, Yijie Chen, Yusong Huang, Haotian Wang, Yixuan Wang, Xinhu Zheng
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. 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
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.
DiDrive introduces a risk‑aware hierarchical diffusion framework for offline reinforcement learning in autonomous driving. It combines a low‑level risk‑gated encoder with a high‑level contextual modulator to filter redundant state information, and a 3DICE policy optimization that reduces out‑of‑distribution overestimation and stabilizes gradients. On the CARLA benchmark, DiDrive outperforms baselines such as IQL, CQL, and Diffusion‑QL, achieving an 85% success rate and a 4295.68 average reward in dense traffic with 60 vehicles.
By Qisong Guo, Jingtang Chen, Zhilin Chen, Pei Xu, Mingjian Fu, Wenxi Liu, Yuanlong Yu
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: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