arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
22h ago

Training-Free Diffusion Planning with Analytical Local Scores

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
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Fast and Highly Expressive Policy Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning via Bootstrapped Flow Q-Learning

arXiv:2606. 10613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based Q-learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for offline reinforcement learning, but its reliance on multi-step denoising makes both training and inference computationally expensive and brittle.

By Thanh Nguyen, Tri Ton, Hongbin Choe, Tung M. Luu, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv AI
Jun 16

QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

arXiv:2606. 14801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult.

By Yifan Ruan, Chenyang Cao, Andreas Burger, Ali Pesaranghader, Kaveh Kamali, Jaehong Kim, Nandita Vijaykumar, Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Igor Gilitschenski, Nicholas Rhinehart
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

On-Policy Self-Distillation in Diffusion Models

The paper introduces DiffusionOPSD, an on‑policy self‑distillation framework that transforms image‑level reinforcement learning rewards into explicit targets for intermediate denoising predictions in diffusion models. By generating trajectories with a frozen behavior policy and constructing bounded positive and negative targets around query states, the method trains a policy to fit these targets before updating the behavior policy via an exponential moving average. Experiments on SD 3.5‑M and Z‑Image‑Turbo show that DiffusionOPSD achieves the best held‑out scores in 19 of 20 reward‑matched settings, outperforms the strongest competitor by up to 44 % and cuts GPU‑hour usage by 40–63 % compared to DiffusionNFT.

By Wei Zhou, Xiongwei Zhu, Lingdong Kong, Bo Chen, Lei Zhang, Yongyuan Liang, Xiaoxia Hou, Ye Tian, Xian Sun, Yingshuo Wang, Linfeng Li, Shengqiong Wu, Leigang Qu, Feng Li, Wei Liu, Julian McAuley, Tat-Seng Chua
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 21

Curvature-Adaptive Consistency Flow Matching: Autonomous Trajectory Optimization via Reinforcement Learning

Consistency distillation has significantly accelerated the inference of diffusion models. In this work, we reveal an intriguing asymmetry: while Logit-Normal sampling priors are highly efficacious for standard iterative generation, consistency distillation exhibits a distinctly different difficulty profile (e.