arXiv Machine Learning

Diffusion-2BC: Hybrid Diffusion and Regression Training for Offline Behavior Cloning in Autonomous Driving

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Closed-Loop Evaluation of Bird's-Eye-View Maps from Cross-View Transformers as Inputs to Behavior-Cloning Policies

The paper studies how Bird's‑Eye‑View (BEV) maps predicted by Cross‑View Transformers (CVT) can be used directly as inputs to a Behavior‑Cloning (BC) driving policy in the CARLA simulator. It introduces a six‑channel BEV representation and a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) weighting scheme to focus learning on underrepresented maneuvers. Closed‑loop tests show that the KDE‑weighted model is the only predicted‑BEV agent to finish an episode without infractions, highlighting that global segmentation scores are poor proxies for driving performance and that prediction quality at critical geometries, especially the route channel, is key to reliable navigation.

By Felipe Carlos dos Santos, Eric Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto
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 17

Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving in CARLA

The paper presents a compact multimodal policy trained via behavioral cloning to drive autonomously in the CARLA simulator. Using five‑frame histories of RGB images, LiDAR, telemetry, and lane waypoints, the 1.36‑million‑parameter model predicts throttle, brake, and steering at 20 Hz. Trained on 236,882 windows (≈3.3 hours of driving) from 448 captures, the policy drives for hours on both training and unseen routes without collisions, demonstrating qualitative transfer and recovery from large trajectory deviations.

By Jordy Kieto
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

End-to-end Conditional Diffusion for Realistic and Controllable Visual Traffic Scenario Generation

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 Machine Learning
Sep 3

DiDrive: A Risk-Aware Hierarchical Diffusion Framework for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous 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 Computer Vision
Sep 18

Latent-Centroid Steering: Single-Pass Classifier-Free Guidance for Command-Aligned Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces Latent-Centroid Steering (LCS), a single-pass classifier-free guidance method for vision‑language autonomous driving models. LCS replaces instance‑level residuals with class‑level latent shifts, projecting conditional representations toward precomputed command‑specific centroids to enhance command adherence. Experiments on Bench2Drive and nuScenes show that LCS cuts inference latency by about 50% while improving driving performance.

By Meibo Hu, Jiamian Wang, Pichao Wang, Zhiqiang Tao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

Dichotomous Diffusion Policy Optimization

arXiv:2601. 00898v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based policies have gained growing popularity in solving a wide range of decision-making tasks due to their superior expressiveness and controllable generation during inference.

By Ruiming Liang, Yinan Zheng, Kexin Zheng, Tianyi Tan, Jianxiong Li, Liyuan Mao, Zhihao Wang, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Jingjing Liu, Jinqiao Wang, Xianyuan Zhan