Learning Direct Control Policies with Flow Matching for Autonomous Driving

We present DriveAnchor, a three-stage framework for autonomous driving planning that achieves behavioral diversity, controllability, and safety in a composable pipeline. Demonstration Flow Pretraining replaces the unstructured Gaussian prior with a vocabulary of 2,398 trajectory shapes constructed by farthest-point sampling, structurally grounding behavioral diversity in vocabulary coverage. Guided Flow Post-training jointly post-trains an Energy Field module with flow matching (FM), conditioning the Energy Field on static road geometry alone, to relocate anchors toward user-specified corridor polygons before flow generation, adding controllability without differentiable guidance; after Stage 2, new corridor presets require only Energy Field updates, not FM retraining. Reward-Refined Flow Fine-tuning applies zeroth-order reinforcement learning to align each anchor's output with collision-avoidance objectives: because the flow-matching model is a deterministic feedforward network in single-step mode, each anchor uniquely determines the output trajectory, reducing reward optimization to a direction search in anchor space without log-likelihood computation or ODE-to-SDE conversion. Evaluated on approximately 2 million held-out driving scenarios, DriveAnchor reduces near-range collision rates by 89% and improves mean reward by 32% without degradation in imitation accuracy, with 2.06 ms inference on NVIDIA Drive Orin. DriveAnchor has been validated through real-world vehicle testing, confirming its practicality for production deployment.

Generating closed-loop traffic scenarios that are both realistic and controllable is crucial for evaluating autonomous driving systems, especially under rare safety-critical interactions. Existing learning-based methods often struggle to balance controllability and realism, offering either limited fine-grained control over traffic behavior or controllable scenarios at the expense of behavioral plausibility. This paper presents E2E-CDiff, an end-to-end conditional diffusion framework for controllable and realistic scenario generation. Conditioned on front-view visual observations, E2E-CDiff jointly denoises future motion states and executable low-level controls for route-interacting background vehicles. This unified state-action generation mitigates the planning-control mismatch in conventional two-stage trajectory-then-controller pipelines. Differentiable guidance further regulates speed, enforces drivable-area compliance, and supports collision-avoidance or collision-seeking behaviors, enabling both naturalistic and safety-critical scenario generation. Experiments on Bench2Drive show that E2E-CDiff achieves a favorable controllability-realism trade-off compared with representative reinforcement- and imitation-learning baselines, while its collision-guided variant induces challenging interactions across multiple autonomous driving systems. E2E-CDiff also performs competitively as a learning-based ego planner, demonstrating the generality of end-to-end state-action diffusion.

While closed-loop motion planners trained on large-scale, object-level datasets, e.g., nuPlan, demonstrate strong in-distribution (ID) performance, their generalization to novel urban topologies and recovery mechanisms following execution perturbations remain under-explored. To address this, we present Shift & Drift, a novel dual-track benchmark designed to rigorously stress-test motion planners across two critical axes of distribution shift: (1) The Semantic Shift Track leverages a novel conversion pipeline that transforms the aerial, DeepScenario Open 3D dataset into the nuPlan simulation framework. This enables zero-shot evaluation of planners trained on North American and Singaporean data against 1,182 scenarios spanning four German cities and the US city of San Francisco featuring dense pedestrian-cyclist interactions. (2) The State-Distribution Drift Track injects stochastic perturbations into the ego vehicle's dynamics to quantify robustness against compounding execution errors. Based on this, we systematically evaluate the failure modes of diverse planning paradigms under semantic and state-distribution shifts. While imitation learning methods achieve high scores in ID benchmarks, they exhibit significant failures under semantic shift, particularly in pedestrian-dense environments, and suffer from persistent drift when subjected to temporally correlated actuation noise. In contrast, the evaluated reinforcement-learning-based planner demonstrates more graceful degradation, maintaining higher safety and progress metrics across both tracks. Our findings reveal an empirical trade-off between imitation fidelity and closed-loop resilience, providing the community with a rigorous benchmark to evaluate progress toward reliable deployment.