Compositional Visual Planning via Inference-Time Diffusion Scaling

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission16263 Authors

Keywords: Planning, Compositionality, Diffusion Models, Robotics

TL;DR: We introduce an inference-time compositional sampling approach that scales to unseen and long-horizon tasks.

Abstract:

Diffusion models excel at short-horizon robot planning, yet scaling them to long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to computational constraints and limited training data.
Existing compositional approaches stitch together short segments by separately denoising each component and averaging overlapping regions. However, this suffers from instability as the factorization assumption breaks down in noisy data space, leading to inconsistent global plans. We propose that the key to stable compositional generation lies in enforcing boundary agreement on the estimated clean data (Tweedie estimates) rather than on noisy intermediate states. Our method formulates long-horizon planning as inference over a chain-structured factor graph of overlapping video chunks, where pretrained short-horizon video diffusion models provide local priors. At inference time, we enforce boundary agreement through a novel combination of synchronous and asynchronous message passing that operates on Tweedie estimates, producing globally consistent guidance without requiring additional training. Our training-free framework demonstrates significant improvements over existing baselines across 100 simulation tasks spanning 4 diverse scenes, effectively generalizing to unseen start-goal combinations that were not present in the original training data. \noindent Project website: \url{https://comp-visual-planning.github.io/}

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

Submission Number: 16263