Flow Matching-Based Autonomous Driving Planning with Advanced Interactive Behavior Modeling

Tianyi Tan, Yinan Zheng, Ruiming Liang, Zexu Wang, Kexin ZHENG, Jinliang Zheng, Jianxiong Li, Xianyuan Zhan, Jingjing Liu

Keywords: Autonomous Driving Planning, Flow Matching

Abstract: Modeling interactive driving behaviors in complex scenarios remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous driving planning. Learning-based approaches attempt to address this challenge with advanced generative models, removing the dependency on over-engineered architectures for representation fusion. However, brute-force implementation by simply stacking transformer blocks lacks a dedicated mechanism for modeling interactive behaviors that is common in real driving scenarios. The scarcity of interactive driving data further exacerbates this problem, leaving conventional imitation learning methods ill-equipped to capture high-value interactive behaviors. We propose Flow Planner, which tackles these problems through coordinated innovations in data modeling, model architecture, and learning scheme. Specifically, we first introduce fine-grained trajectory tokenization, which decomposes the trajectory into overlapping segments to decrease the complexity of whole trajectory modeling. With a sophisticatedly designed architecture, we achieve efficient temporal and spatial fusion of planning and scene information, to better capture interactive behaviors. In addition, the framework incorporates flow matching with classifier-free guidance for multi-modal behavior generation, which dynamically reweights agent interactions during inference to maintain coherent response strategies, providing a critical boost for interactive scenario understanding. Experimental results on the large-scale nuPlan dataset demonstrate that Flow Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance among learning-based approaches while effectively modeling interactive behaviors in complex driving scenarios.

Primary Area: Reinforcement learning (e.g., decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)

Submission Number: 26828