arXiv Computer Vision

Model-Aware Generation of Safety-Critical Scenes for Robust End-to-End Driving via Distilled Planner Surrogates

arXiv AI
Oct 9

BridgeGuard: Explicit Safety Drift for Diffusion-based Autonomous Driving

BridgeGuard is a safety‑constrained diffusion planning method for autonomous driving that progressively strengthens a constraint term during denoising, guiding intermediate trajectories toward a scene‑dependent safety domain. It operates in a low‑dimensional curve space and uses a learned DistanceFieldNet to predict a time‑dependent distance field from bird’s‑eye‑view features, providing safety injection while keeping the perception backbone and planner frozen. Experiments on Bench2Drive show that BridgeGuard improves driving scores and success rates across two diffusion‑based models, demonstrating cross‑model generalization.

By Zhenjun Qiu, Jianing Huang, Dongang Liu, Baiyu Du, Yixun Niu, Hao Yang, Xinyu Huang, Chuan Hu, Shu Liu
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
Jul 21

Learning Adaptive Safety Margins for Visual Navigation

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
arXiv AI
Aug 12

Threat-guided Policy-aware Scene Perturbation for Safe Autonomous Driving with Online Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 10403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising performance in autonomous driving, yet ensuring the safety of online RL policies remains challenging due to insufficient exposure to safety-critical driving scenes.

By Xincong Hu (Nanjing University), Lei Ou (Nanjing University), Maosen Li (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Jingtao Zhang (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Liguo Hou (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Zongzhang Zhang (Nanjing University)
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
Oct 9

SDPAD: A Fully Spike-Driven Pipeline for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

SDPAD is a fully spike‑driven end‑to‑end planning pipeline for autonomous driving that converts a pre‑trained ANN perception stack into integer‑spike form, lifts multi‑view images into a bird’s‑eye‑view space with a spike‑driven depth distribution, and plans via a spiking query transformer that fuses ego, agent, and map queries. On the nuScenes benchmark it matches strong ANN planners with an average L₂ error of 0.40 m and a collision rate of 0.12 %, while consuming only 69.9 mJ—less than 2 % of recent ANN baselines. In closed‑loop NAVSIM evaluation it achieves 86.3 PDMS, surpassing the previous SNN planner SAD by 4.3 points and matching mainstream ANN planners at a fraction of their energy.

By Chengjun Zhang, Yuhao Zhang, Jie Yang, Mohamad Sawan