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: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: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
arXiv:2606. 31106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale datasets and fast simulators have enabled improvements in driving policies that appear safe and robust, yet strong performance in nominal scenarios can still mask flawed reasoning and unsafe heuristics.
By Hyeonchang Jeon, Kyungbeom Kim, Eugene Vinitsky, Kyung-Joong Kim
arXiv:2606. 06423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety-critical traffic scenario generation is essential for evaluating autonomous driving systems under rare but high-risk interactions.
By Qi Lan, Yining Tang, Yu Shen, Yi Zhou, Yuhao Wei, Jie Li, Guofa Li
The paper introduces WM‑RMoE, a World Model‑based Risk‑aware Mixture‑of‑Experts framework for autonomous overtaking. It uses a learned latent dynamics model to perform multi‑step rollouts, evaluating cumulative risk at the trajectory level, and employs a hierarchical gating mechanism to coordinate long‑, short‑horizon, and rule‑based safety experts. A Gaussian Mixture Model preserves multimodal maneuver branches, improving robustness and preventing behavioral averaging, leading to better safety compliance, decision stability, and generalization in experiments.
By Yongzhi Liu, Sunan Zhang, Jinchang Xu, Jiawei Wang, Yushu Qiu, Chen Lv, Weichao Zhuang
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)
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: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
CAR‑VLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action model for autonomous driving that jointly considers scene complexity and dynamic risk to determine reasoning depth, urgency, and focus. It maps four complexity‑risk categories to three reasoning modes—Fast Intuition, Slow Thinking, and Reflex Response—each tailored to different driving scenarios. The model is trained via progressive supervised learning and reinforcement learning, achieving competitive performance on NAVSIM and Navhard benchmarks and demonstrating risk‑aware reasoning in high‑risk scenarios.
By Xiaolei Chen, Zhuolin He, Yuxuan Liang, Xu Li, Haotian Chen, Fan Shi, Mengyang Zhao, Wenjuan Meng, Zisheng Chen, Zhihao Zhu, Zhounan Jin, Hengli Wang, Qingfan Wang, Jiamei Liang, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue
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
End-to-end models that map multimodal inputs directly to future trajectories/maneuvers have emerged as an increasingly prominent research paradigm in autonomous driving. This class of models includes both Vision-Language-Action models and trajectory-generative planners.