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

arXiv:2610.21984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving planning requires selecting trajectories that remain safe, rule-compliant, and comfortable under complex multi-agent interactions, yet robust closed-loop decision making in planning-critical scenes remains challenging. Existing diffusion- and RL-based planners often rely on generic rewards and use relational structure mainly for representation, limiting how planning-critical rollouts shape policy improvement. We present GRID-Planner, a graph--reward integrated diffusion planning framework that aligns generative planning with structured relational signals. Specifically, GRID-Planner combines graph-aware importance weighting, a time-indexed relational reward surrogate, and an advantage-weighted diffusion objective with on-policy self-distillation, forming a rollout-return-advantage-update loop without explicit likelihoods. Experiments on nuPlan and interPlan show that, compared with the diffusion-only baseline, GRID-Planner reduces collision rate, lane deviation, and jerk by 35.8%, 60.8%, and 27.4%, respectively, and improves the planning score by 3.4%. Project website: https://github.com/yangzhaojason/GRID-Planner.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-10-16