Jianxiong Li

Yinan Zheng, Ruiming Liang, Kexin Zheng et al. · tsinghua

Achieving human-like driving behaviors in complex open-world environments is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. Contemporary learning-based planning approaches such as imitation learning methods often struggle to balance competing objectives and lack of safety assurance,due to limited adaptability and inadequacy in learning complex multi-modal behaviors commonly exhibited in human planning, not to mention their strong reliance on the fallback strategy with predefined rules. We propose a novel transformer-based Diffusion Planner for closed-loop planning, which can effectively model multi-modal driving behavior and ensure trajectory quality without any rule-based refinement. Our model supports joint modeling of both prediction and planning tasks under the same architecture, enabling cooperative behaviors between vehicles. Moreover, by learning the gradient of the trajectory score function and employing a flexible classifier guidance mechanism, Diffusion Planner effectively achieves safe and adaptable planning behaviors. Evaluations on the large-scale real-world autonomous planning benchmark nuPlan and our newly collected 200-hour delivery-vehicle driving dataset demonstrate that Diffusion Planner achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop performance with robust transferability in diverse driving styles.

Dongxiu Liu, Haoyi Niu, Zhihao Wang et al. · tsinghua

Current robotic planning methods often rely on predicting multi-frame images with full pixel details. While this fine-grained approach can serve as a generic world model, it introduces two significant challenges for downstream policy learning: substantial computational costs that hinder real-time deployment, and accumulated inaccuracies that can mislead action extraction. Planning with coarse-grained subgoals partially alleviates efficiency issues. However, their forward planning schemes can still result in off-task predictions due to accumulation errors, leading to misalignment with long-term goals. This raises a critical question: Can robotic planning be both efficient and accurate enough for real-time control in long-horizon, multi-stage tasks? To address this, we propose a Latent Space Backward Planning scheme (LBP), which begins by grounding the task into final latent goals, followed by recursively predicting intermediate subgoals closer to the current state. The grounded final goal enables backward subgoal planning to always remain aware of task completion, facilitating on-task prediction along the entire planning horizon. The subgoal-conditioned policy incorporates a learnable token to summarize the subgoal sequences and determines how each subgoal guides action extraction. Through extensive simulation and real-robot long-horizon experiments, we show that LBP outperforms existing fine-grained and forward planning methods, achieving SOTA performance. Project Page: https://lbp-authors.github.io

Tianyi Tan, Yinan Zheng, Ruiming Liang et al. · tsinghua

Modeling interactive driving behaviors in complex scenarios remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous driving planning. Learning-based approaches attempt to address this challenge with advanced generative models, removing the dependency on over-engineered architectures for representation fusion. However, brute-force implementation by simply stacking transformer blocks lacks a dedicated mechanism for modeling interactive behaviors that are common in real driving scenarios. The scarcity of interactive driving data further exacerbates this problem, leaving conventional imitation learning methods ill-equipped to capture high-value interactive behaviors. We propose Flow Planner, which tackles these problems through coordinated innovations in data modeling, model architecture, and learning scheme. Specifically, we first introduce fine-grained trajectory tokenization, which decomposes the trajectory into overlapping segments to decrease the complexity of whole trajectory modeling. With a sophisticatedly designed architecture, we achieve efficient temporal and spatial fusion of planning and scene information, to better capture interactive behaviors. In addition, the framework incorporates flow matching with classifier-free guidance for multi-modal behavior generation, which dynamically reweights agent interactions during inference to maintain coherent response strategies, providing a critical boost for interactive scenario understanding. Experimental results on the large-scale nuPlan dataset and challenging interactive interPlan dataset demonstrate that Flow Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance among learning-based approaches while effectively modeling interactive behaviors in complex driving scenarios.