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. Sum of Costs Diffusion with Dynamic Guidance for Motion Planning

    May 23, 2026Aysu Aylin Kaplan, Özgür ErkentTrajectory GenerationDiffusion-Based Planning

    Computer Engineering Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

  2. Anisotropic Diffusion-Driven Ergodic Coverage in Multi-Robot Systems

    May 22, 2026Thales C. Silva, Anoop Kiran, Nora AyanianMulti-Robot SystemsDiffusion-Based Planning

    Department of Computer Science

  3. ChainFlow-VLA: Causal Flow Planning with Vision-Language Models

    May 22, 2026Xiyang Wang, Xinlin Wang, Tingguang Zhou +7Trajectory GenerationVLMs for Autonomous Driving

    1Afari Intelligent Drive · 2Tianjin University · University of Macau

  4. D3^3-Subsidy: Online and Sequential Driver Subsidy Decision-Making for Large-Scale Ride-Hailing Market

    May 19, 2026Taijie Chen, Rui Su, Siyuan Feng +6Diffusion-Based PlanningSequential Decision Making

    University of Hong Kong · Harbin Institute of Technology · Hong Kong Polytechnic University +1

  5. Plan First, Diffuse Later: Extrinsic Graph Guidance for Long-Horizon Diffusion Planning

    May 16, 2026Yaniv Hassidof, Adir Morgan, Yilun Du +1Trajectory GenerationDiffusion-Based Planning

    Technion · Harvard

  6. DriveSafer: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Safety Guidance

    May 16, 2026Shounak Sural, Raj RajkumarEnd-to-End Autonomous DrivingDiffusion-Based Planning

    Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA

  7. Ada-Diffuser: Latent-Aware Adaptive Diffusion for Decision-Making

    May 15, 2026Fan Feng, Selena Ge, Minghao Fu +6Latent Action LearningLatent Dynamics Modeling

    University of California San Diego · MBZUAI · Carnegie Mellon University +2

  8. Discrete Diffusion for Complex and Congested Multi-Agent Path Finding with Sparse Social Attention

    May 13, 2026Yuanzhe Wang, Tian Zhi, Zihang Wei +8Multi-Agent System OptimizationDiffusion-Based Planning

    State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS · School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, CAS · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +1

  9. The DAWN of World-Action Interactive Models

    May 12, 2026Hongbo Lu, Liang Yao, Chenghao He +6Diffusion-Based PlanningWorld Model-Based Planning

    1COWARobot Co. Ltd · 2Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 3Hohai University

  10. CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving

    May 11, 2026Minqing Huang, Yujiao Xiang, Zihan Liang +7VLMs for Autonomous DrivingDiffusion-Based Planning

    Afari Intelligent Drive · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +2

  11. Muninn: Your Trajectory Diffusion Model But Faster

    May 11, 2026Gokul Puthumanaillam, Hao Jiang, Ruben Hernandez +4Trajectory GenerationDiffusion-Based Planning

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. · Florida International University. · Providence College.

  12. Latency Analysis and Optimization of Alpamayo 1 via Efficient Trajectory Generation

    May 9, 2026Yunseong Jeon, Namcheol Lee, Yoonsu Lee +4Efficient InferenceEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Graduate School of Automobile and Mobility, Kookmin University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  13. HDFlow: Hierarchical Diffusion-Flow Planning for Long-horizon Tasks

    May 6, 2026Nandiraju Gireesh, Yuanliang Ju, Chaoyi Xu +3Hierarchical PlanningLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    1Peking University · University of Toronto. · 2Galbot

  14. Refining Compositional Diffusion for Reliable Long-Horizon Planning

    May 4, 2026Kyowoon Lee, Yunhao Luo, Anh Tong +1Trajectory GenerationDiffusion-Based Planning

    KAIST · University of Michigan · Korea University +1

  15. Decoupled Guidance Diffusion for Adaptive Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

    May 4, 2026Rufeng Chen, Zhaofan Zhang, Zhejiang Yang +2Diffusion-Based PlanningDiffusion Guidance

    1The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · 2Jilin University

  16. Action Agent: Agentic Video Generation Meets Flow-Constrained Diffusion

    May 2, 2026Jeffrin Sam, Nguyen Khang, Yara Mahmoud +2Trajectory GenerationDiffusion-Based Planning

    Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skoltech, Bolshoy Boulevard, 30, Moscow 121205, Russia

  17. Probing Visual Planning in Image Editing Models

    Apr 23, 2026Zhimu Zhou, Yanpeng Zhao, Qiuyu Liao +2Visual Spatial ReasoningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, BIGAI · Renmin University of China

  18. MISTY: High-Throughput Motion Planning via Mixer-based Single-step Drifting

    Apr 23, 2026Yining Xing, Zehong Ke, Yiqian Tu +3Trajectory GenerationDiffusion-Based Planning

    School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  19. RAD-2: Scaling Reinforcement Learning in a Generator-Discriminator Framework

    Apr 16, 2026Hao Gao, Shaoyu Chen, Yifan Zhu +4Diffusion-Based PlanningRL for Diffusion Models

    Huazhong University of Science & Technology · Horizon Robotics

  20. FeaXDrive: Feasibility-aware Trajectory-Centric Diffusion Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Apr 14, 2026Baoyun Wang, Zhuoren Li, Ran Yu +6Diffusion-Based PlanningMotion Planning

    College of Automotive and Energy Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China · College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore

  21. Early Decisions Matter: Proximity Bias and Initial Trajectory Shaping in Non-Autoregressive Diffusion Language Models

    Apr 12, 2026Jiyeon Kim, Sungik Choi, Yongrae Jo +2Non-Autoregressive Text GenerationDiffusion Language Model Decoding

    KAIST AI · LG AI Research · University of Illinois Chicago

  22. Train-Small Deploy-Large: Leveraging Diffusion-Based Multi-Robot Planning

    Apr 8, 2026Siddharth Singh, Soumee Guha, Qing Chang +1Multi-Robot Motion PlanningMulti-Agent Path Finding

    Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia · Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Virginia

  23. Primitive-based Truncated Diffusion for Efficient Trajectory Generation of Differential Drive Mobile Manipulators

    Apr 5, 2026Long Xu, Choilam Wong, Yuhang Zhong +3Diffusion-Based PlanningDiffusion Models for Motion Generation

  24. HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Driving

    Apr 4, 2026Wenhao Yao, Xinglong Sun, Zhenxin Li +4End-to-End Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    Fudan University · NVIDIA

  25. Behavioral Score Diffusion: Model-Free Trajectory Planning via Kernel-Based Score Estimation from Data

    Apr 1, 2026Shihao Li, Jiachen Li, Jiamin Xu +1Diffusion-Based PlanningTrajectory Optimization

    The University of Texas at Austin

  26. Video Models Reason Early: Exploiting Plan Commitment for Maze Solving

    Mar 31, 2026Kaleb Newman, Tyler Zhu, Olga RussakovskyVideo Diffusion ModelsVideo Reasoning

    Princeton University

  27. DiffusionAnything: End-to-End In-context Diffusion Learning for Unified Navigation and Pre-Grasp Motion

    Mar 27, 2026Iana Zhura, Yara Mahmoud, Jeffrin Sam +4Visual Robot NavigationDiffusion-Based Planning

    The authors are with the Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Center for Digital Engineering, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology.

  28. Temporally Decoupled Diffusion Planning for Autonomous Driving

    Mar 26, 2026Xiang Li, Bikun Wang, John Zhang +1Autonomous Driving PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Bosch Cross-Domain Computing Solutions

  29. DiSCo: Diffusion Sequence Copilots for Shared Autonomy

    Mar 24, 2026Andy Wang, Xu Yan, Brandon McMahan +9Shared AutonomyHuman-Robot Collaboration

    University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

  30. Topological Motion Planning Diffusion: Generative Tangle-Free Path Planning for Tethered Robots in Obstacle-Rich Environments

    Mar 16, 2026Yifu Tian, Xinhang Xu, Thien-Minh Nguyen +1Motion PlanningRobot Motion Planning