Barrier Function Conformal Safety Clearance Certification with CVaR for Driving Trajectory Selection

Autonomous driving in complex traffic requires planners that generalize beyond hand-crafted rules, motivating data-driven approaches that learn behavior from expert demonstrations. Diffusion-based trajectory planners have recently shown strong closed-loop performance by iteratively denoising a full-horizon plan, but they remain difficult to certify and can fail catastrophically in rare or out-of-distribution scenarios. To address this challenge, we present PC-Diffuser, a safety augmentation framework that embeds a certifiable, path-consistent barrier-function structure directly into the denoising loop of diffusion planning. The key idea is to make safety an intrinsic part of trajectory generation rather than a post-hoc fix: we enforce forward invariance along the rollout while preserving the diffusion model's intended path geometry. Specifically, PC-Diffuser (i) evaluates collision risk using a capsule-distance barrier function that better reflects vehicle geometry and reduces unnecessary conservativeness, (ii) converts denoised waypoints into dynamically feasible motion under a kinematic bicycle model, and (iii) applies a path-consistent safety filter that eliminates residual constraint violations without geometric distortion, so the corrected plan remains close to the learned distribution. By injecting these safety-consistent corrections at every denoising step and feeding the refined trajectory back into the diffusion process, PC-Diffuser enables iterative, context-aware safeguarding instead of post-hoc repair...

Collision rate remains a dominant metric for evaluating autonomous driving trajectory safety, but its binary nature obscures substantial safety differences among collision-free trajectories. Existing surrogate-safety metrics provide finer-grained assessments, yet often trade off physical interpretability against adaptivity to interaction context. We introduce FutureRisk, a continuous metric that quantifies the latent future risk of a trajectory by how closely and persistently its realized interactions approach unsafe states. At its core, our Context-Adaptive Risk Model (CARM) combines a context-dependent safety-time distribution with an independently supervised critical-event-time distribution. Its safety criterion is bounded around a closed-form physical prior, while a bounded residual provides additional adaptation without abandoning this physical anchor. Experiments on DeepAccident and Bench2Drive show that FutureRisk achieves stronger agreement with native collision labels than existing surrogate-safety measures, discriminates risk among collision-free trajectories, and transfers zero-shot across datasets. Comparisons across four planners further show that FutureRisk reveals safety differences hidden by binary collision outcomes. Together, these results establish FutureRisk as a fine-grained, interpretable, and context-adaptive metric for trajectory safety evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/Xuewen2025/safety-evaluation.

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.