VH-Diffuser: Variable Horizon Diffusion Planner for Time-Aware Goal-Conditioned Trajectory Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Ruijia, Hou, Ancheng, Li, Shaoyuan, Yin, Xiang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Liu, Ruijia
Hou, Ancheng
Li, Shaoyuan
Yin, Xiang
author_facet Liu, Ruijia
Hou, Ancheng
Li, Shaoyuan
Yin, Xiang
contents Diffusion-based planners have gained significant recent attention for their robustness and performance in long-horizon tasks. However, most existing planners rely on a fixed, pre-specified horizon during both training and inference. This rigidity often produces length-mismatch (trajectories that are too short or too long) and brittle performance across instances with varying geometric or dynamical difficulty. In this paper, we introduce the Variable Horizon Diffuser (VHD) framework, which treats the horizon as a learned variable rather than a fixed hyperparameter. Given a start-goal pair, we first predict an instance-specific horizon using a learned Length Predictor model, which guides a Diffusion Planner to generate a trajectory of the desired length. Our design maintains compatibility with existing diffusion planners by controlling trajectory length through initial noise shaping and training on randomly cropped sub-trajectories, without requiring architectural changes. Empirically, VHD improves success rates and path efficiency in maze-navigation and robot-arm control benchmarks, showing greater robustness to horizon mismatch and unseen lengths, while keeping training simple and offline-only.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_11930
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VH-Diffuser: Variable Horizon Diffusion Planner for Time-Aware Goal-Conditioned Trajectory Planning
Liu, Ruijia
Hou, Ancheng
Li, Shaoyuan
Yin, Xiang
Robotics
Systems and Control
Diffusion-based planners have gained significant recent attention for their robustness and performance in long-horizon tasks. However, most existing planners rely on a fixed, pre-specified horizon during both training and inference. This rigidity often produces length-mismatch (trajectories that are too short or too long) and brittle performance across instances with varying geometric or dynamical difficulty. In this paper, we introduce the Variable Horizon Diffuser (VHD) framework, which treats the horizon as a learned variable rather than a fixed hyperparameter. Given a start-goal pair, we first predict an instance-specific horizon using a learned Length Predictor model, which guides a Diffusion Planner to generate a trajectory of the desired length. Our design maintains compatibility with existing diffusion planners by controlling trajectory length through initial noise shaping and training on randomly cropped sub-trajectories, without requiring architectural changes. Empirically, VHD improves success rates and path efficiency in maze-navigation and robot-arm control benchmarks, showing greater robustness to horizon mismatch and unseen lengths, while keeping training simple and offline-only.
title VH-Diffuser: Variable Horizon Diffusion Planner for Time-Aware Goal-Conditioned Trajectory Planning
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11930