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Main Authors: Li, Xiang, Wang, Bikun, Zhang, John, Wang, Jianjun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25462
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author Li, Xiang
Wang, Bikun
Zhang, John
Wang, Jianjun
author_facet Li, Xiang
Wang, Bikun
Zhang, John
Wang, Jianjun
contents Motion planning in dynamic urban environments requires balancing immediate safety with long-term goals. While diffusion models effectively capture multi-modal decision-making, existing approaches treat trajectories as monolithic entities, overlooking heterogeneous temporal dependencies where near-term plans are constrained by instantaneous dynamics and far-term plans by navigational goals. To address this, we propose Temporally Decoupled Diffusion Model (TDDM), which reformulates trajectory generation via a noise-as-mask paradigm. By partitioning trajectories into segments with independent noise levels, we implicitly treat high noise as information voids and weak noise as contextual cues. This compels the model to reconstruct corrupted near-term states by leveraging internal correlations with better-preserved temporal contexts. Architecturally, we introduce a Temporally Decoupled Adaptive Layer Normalization (TD-AdaLN) to inject segment-specific timesteps. During inference, our Asymmetric Temporal Classifier-Free Guidance utilizes weakly noised far-term priors to guide immediate path generation. Evaluations on the nuPlan benchmark show TDDM approaches or exceeds state-of-the-art baselines, particularly excelling in the challenging Test14-hard subset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporally Decoupled Diffusion Planning for Autonomous Driving
Li, Xiang
Wang, Bikun
Zhang, John
Wang, Jianjun
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Motion planning in dynamic urban environments requires balancing immediate safety with long-term goals. While diffusion models effectively capture multi-modal decision-making, existing approaches treat trajectories as monolithic entities, overlooking heterogeneous temporal dependencies where near-term plans are constrained by instantaneous dynamics and far-term plans by navigational goals. To address this, we propose Temporally Decoupled Diffusion Model (TDDM), which reformulates trajectory generation via a noise-as-mask paradigm. By partitioning trajectories into segments with independent noise levels, we implicitly treat high noise as information voids and weak noise as contextual cues. This compels the model to reconstruct corrupted near-term states by leveraging internal correlations with better-preserved temporal contexts. Architecturally, we introduce a Temporally Decoupled Adaptive Layer Normalization (TD-AdaLN) to inject segment-specific timesteps. During inference, our Asymmetric Temporal Classifier-Free Guidance utilizes weakly noised far-term priors to guide immediate path generation. Evaluations on the nuPlan benchmark show TDDM approaches or exceeds state-of-the-art baselines, particularly excelling in the challenging Test14-hard subset.
title Temporally Decoupled Diffusion Planning for Autonomous Driving
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25462