arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computer Vision
5d ago

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

arXiv:2610.35448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end driving models perform well on standard benchmarks but collide frequently in safety-critical scenarios. We present a failure-mode analysis...

By Khaled M. Seyam (University of Stuttgart, Germany), Julian Wiederer (Mercedes-Benz AG, Germany), Samar Fathalah (University of Stuttgart, Germany), Markus Braun (Mercedes-Benz AG, Germany), Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
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 Machine Learning
Oct 2

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

Diffusion-2BC is a hybrid training method that combines a diffusion denoising objective with an auxiliary deterministic behavior‑cloning loss over a shared visual encoder. The auxiliary loss is used only during training, while inference remains diffusion‑based. Experiments on the Claw environment and CARLA navigation show that Diffusion‑2BC reduces mean mask‑distance error by about 10% compared to a diffusion baseline and by 85% compared to standard deterministic behavior cloning, and it enables the agent to travel farther and exhibit multimodal route choices.

By Bruno Maciel Machado, Eric Aislan Antonelo
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
Sep 3

DiffuSearch: How Hybrid Trajectory Planning Benefits from Aligned Objectives in Diffusion and Action Space

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 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