Diffusion-Based Planning

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Overview

Diffusion-based planning studies how to generate useful action sequences and trajectories by refining noisy candidates, often conditioned on goals, maps, observations, or past actions. It is used in autonomous driving, robot navigation and manipulation, multi-robot coordination, and offline reinforcement learning, where multiple plausible plans can help handle uncertainty and complex constraints. Common approaches add guidance from rewards, learned dynamics, safety costs, or language and world models; hierarchical planning, trajectory composition, and distillation aim to extend planning horizons and reduce inference time. A central challenge is making diverse generated plans reliably safe, feasible, and fast in closed-loop settings, while preserving the ability to generalize beyond training data.

Latest papers

CardsList

141 papers21 papers in the last four weeks, up 62% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. AegisFlow: Training-Free Non-Myopic Path-Safe Guided Flow Matching

    Oct 29, 2026Kunpeng Liu, Boshi Zhang, Keyou YouConstrained Generative ModelingFlow-Based Generative Modeling

    Department of Automation and BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  2. Compositional Diffusion Planning with Chunk Selection and Reachability Measure

    Oct 28, 2026Chanyoung Park, Youngjoong Kim, Jaesik ParkDiffusion-Based PlanningReachability Analysis

    Seoul National University

  3. ExecDiffuser: Closing the Sample-to-Execution Gap in Diffusion Planning

    Oct 27, 2026Shuo Pei, Bosun Liang, Saihui Zha +3Autonomous Driving PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Shuo Pei, Saihui Zha, Huachun Tan are with the Beijing Institute of Technology, Guangdong, China. · Shuo Pei, Bosun Liang, Chen Sun, and Yong Wang (Corresponding author) are with the Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

  4. To Route or to Adapt? Multi-Expert Diffusion Planners in Unseen Regions

    Oct 22, 2026Yun Li, Ehsan Javanmardi, Simon Thompson +7Autonomous Driving PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    The University of Tokyo · TIER IV, Inc. · Huawei

  5. Binary Discrete Diffusion: Candidate-Set Diffusion for Logic and Planning Tasks

    Oct 20, 2026Rodrigo Casado Noguerales, Dimitri von Rütte, Bernhard Schölkopf +2Diffusion ModelsDiffusion-Based Planning

    ETH Zurich · Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems · ELLIS Institute Tübingen

  6. DiPLO: Self-distilled Diffusion Planning for Loco-manipulation

    Oct 17, 2026Shafeef Omar, Sebastian Sanokowski, Elham Daneshmand +4Robotic Loco-ManipulationHumanoid Loco-Manipulation

    Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany. · Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. · McGill University, Montreal, Canada. +1

  7. GRID-Planner: Graph-Structured Relational Reward Shaping for Diffusion Planning

    Oct 15, 2026Zhao Yang, Zezhong Qian, Yinan Shi +2Autonomous Driving PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · Cytoderm Intelligent Technology, Beijing, China

  8. Collaborative Planning for UAV-UGV Teams under Operational Constraints via Masked Error-bounded Neuro-Symbolic Diffusion

    Oct 13, 2026Zihao Deng, Qianhuang Li, Maggie Wigness +3Neuro-Symbolic PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    University of Massachusetts Amherst · U.S. Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory

  9. Model-Based Online Decision Making via Generative Trajectory Planning

    Oct 13, 2026Haldun Balim, Yilun Du, Na LiModel-Based PlanningModel-Based RL

    Harvard University

  10. Size Generalization for Diffusion Routing Solvers

    Oct 12, 2026Barak Itzchak Davidovitch, Eli Meirom, Ethan Fetaya +1Combinatorial OptimizationVehicle Routing

    Bar-Ilan University · NVIDIA

  11. MOSAIC: Mode- and Support-Aware Inference-Time Control of Robot Diffusion Models

    Oct 12, 2026Sabrina Bodmer, Rahel Rickenbach, René Zurbrügg +2Inference-Time GuidanceDiffusion Guidance

    Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. · Automatic Control Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland.

  12. Akule: Fast and Scalable Multi-Robot Motion Planning via Sparse Interaction Diffusion

    Oct 9, 2026Manav Vora, Gokul Puthumanaillam, Aditya Penumarti +2Multi-Robot Motion PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

  13. Non-Prehensile Multi-Object Placement with Mobile Robots via Diffusion-Based Trajectory Planning

    Oct 8, 2026Lance Pharand, Megnath Ramesh, Mark Chiu +2Non-Prehensile ManipulationRobotic Object Pushing

    Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo, ON, Canada

  14. BridgeGuard: Explicit Safety Drift for Diffusion-based Autonomous Driving

    Oct 8, 2026Zhenjun Qiu, Jianing Huang, Dongang Liu +6Safe Motion PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Bosch Research · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  15. Plan-and-Patch: Diffusion Language Models for Agentic Planning

    Oct 7, 2026Syamantak Kumar, Jiang Guo, Hassan Hamad +6LLM PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    University of Texas at Austin · Amazon

  16. Model-Based Geometry-Aware Generative Optimization for Constrained Locomotion Planning

    Oct 6, 2026Zhilin He, Xinyuan Wang, Changliu LiuConstrained Generative ModelingConstrained Motion Planning

    Carnegie Mellon University · University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  17. Execution-Aligned Progressive Noise for Consistent Asynchronous Replanning in Generative Robot Policies

    Oct 5, 2026Di Wu, Ping Liu, Xuhua Chen +3Robot Policy LearningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Magiclab Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., China · Southeast University, Nanjing, China

  18. P3: Persistent Particle Planning for Constrained Diffusion Control

    Oct 5, 2026Hikmet Simsir, Mahyar Fardinfar, Ozgur S. OguzConstrained Motion PlanningTrajectory Generation

    Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University

  19. Spacecraft Rendezvous Trajectory Generation with Modular Constraints via Diffusion Model Composition

    Oct 5, 2026Mariko A. Storey-Matsutani, Richard LinaresConstrained Generative ModelingTrajectory Generation

    Graduate Student, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Cambridge MA · Associate Professor, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Cambridge MA

  20. Training-Free Diffusion Planning with Analytical Local Scores

    Oct 1, 2026Michael Y. Fatemi, Jinhao Liang, Ferdinando FiorettoMulti-Robot Motion PlanningConstrained Motion Planning

    University of Virginia

  21. Learning to Explain While Planning: Rule-Aligned Diffusion Planning for Autonomous Driving

    Sep 30, 2026Jiaxi Ye, Chunji Lv, Guoren Wang +1Diffusion-Based PlanningAutonomous Driving Planning

    Beijing Institute of Technology

  22. Trajectory-Level Mode Guidance for Controllable Diffusion-Based Multi-Robot Motion Planning

    Sep 29, 2026Tianyou Yu, Shengze Cai, Chao XuMulti-Robot Motion PlanningTrajectory Generation

    Institute of Cyber-System and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

  23. Denoising Multi-Robot Trajectories

    Sep 28, 2026Yuhao Zhang, Keisuke Okumura, Ajay Shankar +1Multi-Robot Motion PlanningKinodynamic Motion Planning

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, U.K. · National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan

  24. Diffusion Subgoal Planning for Long-Horizon Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 28, 2026Hengrui Zhang, Yuhu Cheng, C. L. Philip Chen +1Diffusion-Based PlanningHierarchical RL

    School of Information and Control Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology · School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology

  25. Optimizing H-Graph Hybridization for Diffusion-Guided RRT

    Sep 26, 2026Omer TalmiMotion PlanningRobot Motion Planning

    Tel Aviv University

  26. Decentralized Master-Mind: Joint Action Refinement through Iterative Intent Denoising in Multi-Agent Pathfinding

    Sep 25, 2026Valeriy Vyaltsev, Anton Andreychuk, Taisia Zlotnikova +3Multi-Agent Path FindingDecentralized Multi-Agent Motion Planning

    CogAI Lab, Moscow, Russia

  27. SoGuDiff: Socially Guided Diffusion for Steerable, Norm-Grounded Robot Navigation

    Sep 24, 2026Christian Schaible, Haoran Ji, Yash Vardhan Pant +1Robot NavigationSocial Robot Navigation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada · Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

  28. Koopman-Accelerated Model-Based Diffusion for Real-Time Robot Control

    Sep 24, 2026Bohyeong Pak, Kangmin Lee, Sanghyun KimRobotic ControlDiffusion-Based Planning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Republic of Korea.

  29. ForeDrive: Foresight-Guided End-to-End Autonomous Driving with a Planning-Relevant Latent World Model

    Sep 22, 2026Sinuo Wang, Zichong Gu, Yuhan Huang +10End-to-End Autonomous DrivingDiffusion-Based Planning

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Shanghai Zaofu Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. · Tongji University

  30. FlockDiffusion: Assignment-Conditioned Diffusion for Multi-Drone Task Allocation and Completion

    Sep 20, 2026Iana Zhura, Satenik Akopyan, Roohan Ahmed Khan +3Multi-Robot Motion PlanningAerial Robotics

    Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia