Control-Ready Uncertainty for Trajectory Diffusion

Diffusion-based trajectory planners can synthesize rich, multimodal robot motions, but their iterative denoising makes online planning and control prohibitively slow. Existing accelerations either modify the sampler or compress the network--sacrificing plan quality or requiring retraining without accounting for downstream control risk. We address the problem of making diffusion-based trajectory planners fast enough for real-time robot use without retraining the model or sacrificing trajectory quality, and in a way that works across diverse state-space diffusion architectures. Our key insight is that diffusion trajectory planners expose two signals we can exploit: a cheap probe of how their internal trajectory representation changes across steps, and analytic coefficients that describe how denoiser errors affect the sampler's state update. By calibrating the first signal against the second on offline runs, we obtain a per-step score that upper-bounds how far the final trajectory can deviate when we reuse a cached denoiser output, and we treat this bound as an uncertainty budget that we can spend over the denoising process. Building on this insight, we present Muninn, a training-free caching wrapper that tracks this uncertainty budget during sampling and, at each diffusion step, chooses between reusing a cached denoiser output when the predicted deviation is small and recomputing the denoiser when it is not. Across standard benchmarks Muninn delivers up to 4.6x wall-clock speedups across several trajectory diffusion models by reducing denoiser evaluations, while preserving task performance and safety metrics. Muninn further certifies that cached rollouts remain within a specified distance of their full-compute counterparts, and we validate these gains in real-time closed-loop navigation and manipulation hardware deployments. Project page: https://github.com/gokulp01/Muninn.

Multi-agent trajectory modeling traditionally focuses on forecasting, often neglecting more general tasks like trajectory completion, which is essential for real-world applications such as correcting tracking data. Existing methods also generally predict agents' states without offering any state-wise measure of heteroscedastic uncertainty. Moreover, popular multi-modal sampling methods lack error probability estimates for each generated scene under the same prior observations, which makes it difficult to rank the predictions at inference time. We introduce U2Diffine, a unified diffusion model built to perform trajectory completion while simultaneously offering state-wise heteroscedastic uncertainty estimates. This is achieved by augmenting the standard denoising loss with the negative log-likelihood of the predicted noise, and then propagating the latent space uncertainty to the real state space using a first-order Taylor approximation. We also propose U2Diff, a faster baseline that avoids gradient computation during sampling. This approach significantly increases inference speed, making it as efficient as a standard generative-only diffusion model. For post-processing, we integrate a Rank Neural Network (RankNN) that enables error probability estimation for each generated mode, demonstrating strong correlation with ground truth errors. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in both trajectory completion and forecasting across four challenging sports datasets (NBA, Basketball-U, Football-U, Soccer-U), underscoring the effectiveness of our uncertainty and error probability estimation.

Diffusion models are effective for waypoint prediction in visual navigation, but standard sampling and test time guidance can produce unreliable or inefficient trajectories when updates drift off the training manifold. We propose Fisher Preserving Guidance with Outer Product Span Projection, a training-free inference method that avoids large Fisher drift associated with off-distribution actions while optimizing a task objective. Our method computes the Fisher-preserving update via a low-rank Jacobian factorization, requiring only a single backward pass per step and enabling real-time use. We further introduce Truncated Fisher Denoising Sensitivity as an uncertainty signal and use it for robust multi-sample action blending. Experiments on toy and realistic navigation benchmarks, including Maze2D with TSDF-based guidance, PushT with official Diffusion Policy weights, and visual navigation in simulation and on real robots, demonstrate consistent improvements in performance over strong diffusion-policy baselines without additional training.