RAPiD: Real-time Deterministic Trajectory Planning via Diffusion Behavior Priors for Safe and Efficient Autonomous Driving

Diffusion-based trajectory planners have demonstrated strong capability for modeling the multimodal nature of human driving behavior, but their reliance on iterative stochastic sampling poses critical challenges for real-time, safety-critical deployment. In this work, we present RAPiD, a deterministic policy extraction framework that distills a pretrained diffusion-based planner into an efficient policy while eliminating diffusion sampling. Using score-regularized policy optimization, we leverage the score function of a pre-trained diffusion planner as a behavior prior to regularize policy learning. To promote safety and passenger comfort, the policy is optimized using a critic trained to imitate a predictive driver controller, providing dense, safety-focused supervision beyond conventional imitation learning. Evaluations demonstrate that RAPiD achieves competitive performance on closed-loop nuPlan scenarios with an 8x speedup over diffusion baselines, while achieving state-of-the-art generalization among learning-based planners on the interPlan benchmark. The official website of this work is: https://github.com/ruturajreddy/RAPiD.

Seeing Roads Through Words: A Language-Guided Framework for RGB-T Driving Scene Segmentation

Robust semantic segmentation of road scenes under adverse illumination, lighting, and shadow conditions remain a core challenge for autonomous driving applications. RGB-Thermal fusion is a standard approach, yet existing methods apply static fusion strategies uniformly across all conditions, allowing modality-specific noise to propagate throughout the network. Hence, we propose CLARITY that dynamically adapts its fusion strategy to the detected scene condition. Guided by vision-language model (VLM) priors, the network learns to modulate each modality's contribution based on the illumination state while leveraging object embeddings for segmentation, rather than applying a fixed fusion policy. We further introduce two mechanisms, i.e., one which preserves valid dark-object semantics that prior noise-suppression methods incorrectly discard, and a hierarchical decoder that enforces structural consistency across scales to sharpen boundaries on thin objects. Experiments on the MFNet dataset demonstrate that CLARITY establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), achieving 62.3% mIoU and 77.5% mAcc.

Drive As You Like: Strategy-Level Motion Planning Based on A Multi-Head Diffusion Model

Recent advances in motion planning for autonomous driving have led to models capable of generating high-quality trajectories. However, most existing planners tend to fix their policy after supervised training, leading to consistent but rigid driving behaviors. This limits their ability to reflect human preferences or adapt to dynamic, instruction-driven demands. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based multi-head trajectory planner(M-diffusion planner). During the early training stage, all output heads share weights to learn to generate high-quality trajectories. Leveraging the probabilistic nature of diffusion models, we then apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to fine-tune the pre-trained model for diverse policy-specific behaviors. At inference time, we incorporate a large language model (LLM) to guide strategy selection, enabling dynamic, instruction-aware planning without switching models. Closed-loop simulation demonstrates that our post-trained planner retains strong planning capability while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the nuPlan val14 benchmark. Open-loop results further show that the generated trajectories exhibit clear diversity, effectively satisfying multi-modal driving behavior requirements. The code and related experiments will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

Learning Energy-Based Generative Models via Potential Flow: A Variational Principle Approach to Probability Density Homotopy Matching

Energy-based models (EBMs) are a powerful class of probabilistic generative models due to their flexibility and interpretability. However, relationships between potential flows and explicit EBMs remain underexplored, while contrastive divergence training via implicit Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is often unstable and expensive in high-dimensional settings. In this paper, we propose Variational Potential Flow Bayes (VPFB), a new energy-based generative framework that eliminates the need for implicit MCMC sampling and does not rely on auxiliary networks or cooperative training. VPFB learns an energy-parameterized potential flow by constructing a flow-driven density homotopy that is matched to the data distribution through a variational loss minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the flow-driven and marginal homotopies. This principled formulation enables robust and efficient generative modeling while preserving the interpretability of EBMs. Experimental results on image generation, interpolation, out-of-distribution detection, and compositional generation confirm the effectiveness of VPFB, showing that our method performs competitively with existing approaches in terms of sample quality and versatility across diverse generative modeling tasks.

ST-HCSS: Deep Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph Convolutional Neural Network for Soft Sensing

Higher-order sensor networks are more accurate in characterizing the nonlinear dynamics of sensory time-series data in modern industrial settings by allowing multi-node connections beyond simple pairwise graph edges. In light of this, we propose a deep spatio-temporal hypergraph convolutional neural network for soft sensing (ST-HCSS). In particular, our proposed framework is able to construct and leverage a higher-order graph (hypergraph) to model the complex multi-interactions between sensor nodes in the absence of prior structural knowledge. To capture rich spatio-temporal relationships underlying sensor data, our proposed ST-HCSS incorporates stacked gated temporal and hypergraph convolution layers to effectively aggregate and update hypergraph information across time and nodes. Our results validate the superiority of ST-HCSS compared to existing state-of-the-art soft sensors, and demonstrates that the learned hypergraph feature representations aligns well with the sensor data correlations. The code is available at https://github.com/htew0001/ST-HCSS.git

KANS: Knowledge Discovery Graph Attention Network for Soft Sensing in Multivariate Industrial Processes

Soft sensing of hard-to-measure variables is often crucial in industrial processes. Current practices rely heavily on conventional modeling techniques that show success in improving accuracy. However, they overlook the non-linear nature, dynamics characteristics, and non-Euclidean dependencies between complex process variables. To tackle these challenges, we present a framework known as a Knowledge discovery graph Attention Network for effective Soft sensing (KANS). Unlike the existing deep learning soft sensor models, KANS can discover the intrinsic correlations and irregular relationships between the multivariate industrial processes without a predefined topology. First, an unsupervised graph structure learning method is introduced, incorporating the cosine similarity between different sensor embedding to capture the correlations between sensors. Next, we present a graph attention-based representation learning that can compute the multivariate data parallelly to enhance the model in learning complex sensor nodes and edges. To fully explore KANS, knowledge discovery analysis has also been conducted to demonstrate the interpretability of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that KANS significantly outperforms all the baselines and state-of-the-art methods in soft sensing performance. Furthermore, the analysis shows that KANS can find sensors closely related to different process variables without domain knowledge, significantly improving soft sensing accuracy.

Cross-Domain Transfer Learning using Attention Latent Features for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction

With the advancements of sensor hardware, traffic infrastructure and deep learning architectures, trajectory prediction of vehicles has established a solid foundation in intelligent transportation systems. However, existing solutions are often tailored to specific traffic networks at particular time periods. Consequently, deep learning models trained on one network may struggle to generalize effectively to unseen networks. To address this, we proposed a novel spatial-temporal trajectory prediction framework that performs cross-domain adaption on the attention representation of a Transformer-based model. A graph convolutional network is also integrated to construct dynamic graph feature embeddings that accurately model the complex spatial-temporal interactions between the multi-agent vehicles across multiple traffic domains. The proposed framework is validated on two case studies involving the cross-city and cross-period settings. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves superior trajectory prediction and domain adaptation performances over the state-of-the-art models.

Energy-efficient Hybrid Model Predictive Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Electric Vehicles

To tackle the twin challenges of limited battery life and lengthy charging durations in electric vehicles (EVs), this paper introduces an Energy-efficient Hybrid Model Predictive Planner (EHMPP), which employs an energy-saving optimization strategy. EHMPP focuses on refining the design of the motion planner to be seamlessly integrated with the existing automatic driving algorithms, without additional hardware. It has been validated through simulation experiments on the Prescan, CarSim, and Matlab platforms, demonstrating that it can increase passive recovery energy by 11.74\% and effectively track motor speed and acceleration at optimal power. To sum up, EHMPP not only aids in trajectory planning but also significantly boosts energy efficiency in autonomous EVs.

Variational Potential Flow: A Novel Probabilistic Framework for Energy-Based Generative Modelling

Energy based models (EBMs) are appealing for their generality and simplicity in data likelihood modeling, but have conventionally been difficult to train due to the unstable and time-consuming implicit MCMC sampling during contrastive divergence training. In this paper, we present a novel energy-based generative framework, Variational Potential Flow (VAPO), that entirely dispenses with implicit MCMC sampling and does not rely on complementary latent models or cooperative training. The VAPO framework aims to learn a potential energy function whose gradient (flow) guides the prior samples, so that their density evolution closely follows an approximate data likelihood homotopy. An energy loss function is then formulated to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between density evolution of the flow-driven prior and the data likelihood homotopy. Images can be generated after training the potential energy, by initializing the samples from Gaussian prior and solving the ODE governing the potential flow on a fixed time interval using generic ODE solvers. Experiment results show that the proposed VAPO framework is capable of generating realistic images on various image datasets. In particular, our proposed framework achieves competitive FID scores for unconditional image generation on the CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets.

MDHA: Multi-Scale Deformable Transformer with Hybrid Anchors for Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Multi-view 3D object detection is a crucial component of autonomous driving systems. Contemporary query-based methods primarily depend either on dataset-specific initialization of 3D anchors, introducing bias, or utilize dense attention mechanisms, which are computationally inefficient and unscalable. To overcome these issues, we present MDHA, a novel sparse query-based framework, which constructs adaptive 3D output proposals using hybrid anchors from multi-view, multi-scale input. Fixed 2D anchors are combined with depth predictions to form 2.5D anchors, which are projected to obtain 3D proposals. To ensure high efficiency, our proposed Anchor Encoder performs sparse refinement and selects the top-k anchors and features. Moreover, while existing multi-view attention mechanisms rely on projecting reference points to multiple images, our novel Circular Deformable Attention mechanism only projects to a single image but allows reference points to seamlessly attend to adjacent images, improving efficiency without compromising on performance. On the nuScenes val set, it achieves 46.4% mAP and 55.0% NDS with a ResNet101 backbone. MDHA significantly outperforms the baseline, where anchor proposals are modelled as learnable embeddings.