Autonomous driving requires safe planning, but most learning-based planners lack explicit self-correction ability: once an unsafe action is proposed, there is no mechanism to correct it. Thus, we propose CorrectionPlanner, an autoregressive planner with self-correction that models planning as motion-token generation within a propose, evaluate, and correct loop. At each planning step, the policy proposes an action, namely a motion token, and a learned collision critic predicts whether it will induce a collision within a short horizon. If the critic predicts a collision, we retain the sequence of historical unsafe motion tokens as a self-correction trace, generate the next motion token conditioned on it, and repeat this process until a safe motion token is proposed or the safety criterion is met. This self-correction trace, consisting of all unsafe motion tokens, represents the planner's correction process in motion-token space, analogous to a reasoning trace in language models. We train the planner with imitation learning followed by model-based reinforcement learning using rollouts from a pretrained world model that realistically models agents' reactive behaviors. Closed-loop evaluations show that CorrectionPlanner reduces collision rate by over 20% on Waymax and achieves state-of-the-art planning scores on nuPlan.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: (a) Vanilla autoregressive models, no correction mechanism. (b) autoregressive models that generate tokens sequentially, with reasoning through language. (c) autoregressive models that generate subsequent tokens sequentially with self-correction through motion tokens.
Figure 2: Blue box is ego; red cross is collision; orange trajectory is the expert trajectory. Left: autoregressive without self-correction. Right: autoregressive with self-correction. Collision is avoided with self-correction before the collision by slowing down to yield to the right-turn vehicle and then re-accelerating.
Figure 3: (a) Policy architecture. A frozen reactive world model predicts future motions for the ego and other agents. Conditioned on scene history and map/navigation context, the planner is an autoregressive policy that generates the next ego motion token. When self-correction is triggered, previously rejected proposals are retained as a correction trace and integrated via a self-attention encoder to condition subsequent proposals, providing an explicit correction signal during both imitation learning and RL. (b) Self-correction. At each planning timestep, the policy proposes an ego motion token, and a learned collision critic evaluates whether it will cause a collision within a short horizon. If unsafe, the policy iteratively generates revised motion tokens conditioned on the correction trace until a safe token is found (or a maximum number of correction steps is reached). The resulting rollout contains both executed ego tokens and intermediate correction tokens, and the policy is further optimized with REINFORCE using a rule-based reward and KL regularization.
Reactive
Non-Reactive
Method
Collision ↓
Offroad ↓
Progression ↑
Collision ↓
Offroad ↓
Progression ↑
EasyChauffeur-PPO∗ ( Xiao et al., 2024 )
4.71
3.81
97.93
4.53
2.14
96.42
PlanT∗ ( Renz et al., 2022 )
2.94
1.65
95.85
3.02
1.43
95.48
LatentDrive∗ ( Xiao et al., 2025 )
3.27
2.33
98.70
3.11
1.94
99.21
SMART∗ ( Wu et al., 2024 )
2.36
0.87
91.33
4.30
0.86
90.87
Ours
1.68
0.94
94.23
2.43
0.92
95.75
Table 1: Comparison with baselines on Waymax simulator. Our method reduces the collision rate by over 20% . ∗ means we re-implement the method. We use bold and underline to denote the best and second best.
Val14
Test-Hard
Test-Random
Learning-Based Method
NR
R
NR
R
NR
R
PDM-Open ( Dauner et al., 2023 )
53.53
54.24
33.51
35.83
52.81
57.23
UrbanDriver ( Scheel et al., 2022 )
68.57
64.11
50.40
49.95
51.83
67.15
PlanTF ( Cheng et al., 2024b )
84.72
76.95
69.70
61.61
85.62
79.58
PLUTO ( Cheng et al., 2024a )
88.89
78.11
70.03
59.74
89.90
78.62
DiffusionPlanner ( Zheng et al., 2025 )
89.87
82.80
75.99
69.22
89.19
82.93
Table 2: Comparison with baselines on nuPlan under non-reactive (NR) and reactive (R) settings. Our method outperforms baselines. ∗ means we re-implement the method. We use bold and underline to denote the best and second best.
Type
Planner Score ↑
Collisions ↓
TTC ↑
Drivable ↑
Comfort ↑
Progress ↑
Speed ↑
SMART
90.03
2.70
91.79
99.02
99.34
91.68
97.38
Ours
91.22
2.04
92.25
98.76
99.31
91.49
97.49
Table 3: Planning performance comparison on Val14 NR.
Figure 4: Visualization on self-correction. (a),(c) and (e): our method w/o self-correction in inference. (b), (d) and (f): our method w/ self-correction. Orange trajectory is the log trajectory. Our method avoids the collision in these scenarios.
Method
Collision ↓
Progression ↑
Waymo
IL
2.34
95.77
IL (w/ corr.)
2.31
95.41
RL (w/o corr.)
2.21
94.98
CorrectionPlanner (w/o corr.)
2.20
95.02
CorrectionPlanner
1.68
94.23
Table 4: Comparison across training frameworks.
Figure 5: Effect of collision classification threshold and correction length on safety and progression.
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Method
Collision ↓
Progression ↑
Alternate Self-Correction
2.01
0.9501
Ours
1.68
0.9423
Appendix
Table 7: Comparison with alternate self-correction baseline on WOMD.
Method
Collision ↓
Offroad ↓
Progression ↑
EasyChauffeur-PPO ( Xiao et al., 2024 )
4.71
3.81
97.93
PlanT ( Renz et al., 2022 )
2.94
1.65
95.85
LatentDrive ( Xiao et al., 2025 )
3.27
2.33
98.70
SMART ( Wu et al., 2024 )
2.36
0.87
91.33
Zero Shot (w/o corr.)
2.93
1.40
93.64
Zero Shot (w/ corr.)
2.62
1.26
92.83
Appendix
Table 8: Zero-shot generalization ability of our method. Policy trained on the nuPlan dataset, evaluated on the Waymax simulator. The zero-shot (w/ corr.) is our method, and it achieves the second-lowest collision rate, alongside our method trained on WOMD, demonstrating zero-shot generalization and self-correction.
Method / Threshold
0.00
0.70
0.75
0.80
SMART
0.329
–
–
–
SFT
0.357
–
–
–
CorrectionPlanner
Correction length = 1
0.917
0.497
0.392
0.387
Correction length = 2
0.994
0.525
0.413
0.407
Correction length = 5
1.162
1.036
0.434
0.431
Appendix
Table 9: Waymo latency (seconds) under different collision classification thresholds per trajectory. The best-performing hyperparameters, with 0.75 as the threshold and 5 as the correction length, don’t significantly increase inference time. Experiment conducted on one NVIDIA H800 GPU.
k
Collision ↓
Progression ↑
1
2.19
96.53
3
1.97
94.99
5
1.68
94.23
7
1.63
91.42
Appendix
Table 10: Experiment results on different k when training the collision critic on WOMD.
Figure 6: Slow down and yield to the right-turning vehicle.
Figure 7: Slow down and yield to the right-turning vehicle, re-accelerate afterwards.
Figure 8: Adjust the speed in the left turn to avoid a collision.
Figure 9: Adjust the left turn to avoid a collision in the intersection.
Figure 10: Adjust the speed and yield to multiple left turn vehicle.
High-level autonomous driving requires motion planners capable of modeling multimodal future uncertainties while remaining robust in closed-loop interactions. Although diffusion-based planners are effective at modeling complex trajectory distributions, they often suffer from stochastic instabilities and the lack of corrective negative feedback when trained purely with imitation learning. To address these issues, we propose RAD-2, a unified generator-discriminator framework for closed-loop planning. Specifically, a diffusion-based generator is used to produce diverse trajectory candidates, while an RL-optimized discriminator reranks these candidates according to their long-term driving quality. This decoupled design avoids directly applying sparse scalar rewards to the full high-dimensional trajectory space, thereby improving optimization stability. To further enhance reinforcement learning, we introduce Temporally Consistent Group Relative Policy Optimization, which exploits temporal coherence to alleviate the credit assignment problem. In addition, we propose On-policy Generator Optimization, which converts closed-loop feedback into structured longitudinal optimization signals and progressively shifts the generator toward high-reward trajectory manifolds. To support efficient large-scale training, we introduce BEV-Warp, a high-throughput simulation environment that performs closed-loop evaluation directly in Bird's-Eye View feature space via spatial warping. RAD-2 reduces the collision rate by 56% compared with strong diffusion-based planners. Real-world deployment further demonstrates improved perceived safety and driving smoothness in complex urban traffic.
Hao Gao, Shaoyu Chen, Yifan Zhu +4
Huazhong University of Science & Technology · Horizon Robotics
Robust motion planning in dense traffic requires autonomous vehicles to interact in rare and safety-critical scenarios that are underrepresented in naturalistic driving data. Although adversarial training offers a feasible solution, existing methods often rely on external scenario generators, heuristic perturbations, or simulator-heavy rollouts, which makes them difficult to integrate with modern autoregressive planners. Here, we cast adversarially robust planner learning as a constrained min-max game and propose Adversarial World Modeling (AWM), a theoretically grounded multi-agent self-play fine-tuning framework. Since solving the exact game is intractable, AWM introduces a principled decoupled solver. In the inner minimization, the planner's predictive world model is converted into a role-conditioned adversary that learns sparse, scene-adaptive attack coalitions via counterfactual credit assignment. In the outer maximization, the ego planner optimizes a regret-aware robust best response against the frozen AWM, utilizing tail-risk weighting and reference-anchored trust regions to improve hard-case recovery while preserving nominal driving behavior. Experiments on the nuPlan and InterPlan benchmarks demonstrate that our method generates transferable adversarial interactions and yields a robust planner that achieves competitive closed-loop performance in both nominal and highly interactive long-tail scenarios. Theoretical analysis justifies the decoupled solver and the main optimization components.
Tong Nie, Yuewen Mei, Junlin He +3
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Tongji University · McGill University +1
Learning-based driving planners are usually trained and evaluated in open loop against logged trajectories. In closed loop, a trajectory with small displacement error can still stall the vehicle, steer it into a conflict with surrounding agents, or be executed with abrupt braking. We introduce Closed-Loop Refinement and Execution (CLRE), a hierarchical receding-horizon control framework designed to mitigate these failure modes while leaving the upstream planner frozen and adding no new learned model. The upper layer treats the nominal trajectory as a reference and solves a finite-horizon optimal control problem that trades route progress against interaction with predicted agents. Solving it from several initializations gives a candidate set, and a prediction-conditioned oriented-bounding-box (OBB) feasibility test retains only candidates whose minimum predicted OBB clearance over the horizon meets a threshold. The lower layer executes the lowest-cost survivor, or a route-centerline backup when none remains, through the tracking controller supplied with the planner, augmented by a range-based speed bound and a saturated proportional braking law. In closed-loop simulation on the 220-route Bench2Drive validation set with VAD as the upstream planner, CLRE raises the driving score from 42.26 to 55.89 and route completion from 55.69 to 71.51, and reduces collision events from 117 to 97.
Huaijin Hu, Shanting Wang, Zhongyu Mo +1
Systems Engineering Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA