# MARC: Multipolicy and Risk-aware Contingency Planning for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12021/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ModeSeq: Taming Sparse Multimodal Motion Prediction with Sequential Mode Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11911/) (2024)
- [Predictive Control for Autonomous Driving with Uncertain, Multi-modal Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20561/) (2023)
- [Traffic-Rule-Compliant Trajectory Repair via Satisfiability Modulo Theories and Reachability Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15837/) (2024)
- [Integrated Decision Making and Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Driving Under Multimodal Uncertainties: A Bayesian Game Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13993/) (2024)
- [PMM-Net: Single-stage Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction with Patching-based Embedding and Explicit Modal Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19544/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Edge with the State-of-the-Art Insights into Corner Case Identification and Generation for Enhanced Autonomous Vehicle Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00077/) (2025)
- [Bench4Merge: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Merging in Realistic Dense Traffic with Micro-Interactive Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15912/) (2024)
- [Robust Planning for Autonomous Driving via Mixed Adversarial Diffusion Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12327/) (2025)
- [Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst: Occlusion-Aware Contingency Planning for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03155/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating safe and non-conservative behaviors in dense, dynamic environments remains challenging for automated vehicles due to the stochastic nature of traffic participants' behaviors and their implicit interaction with the ego vehicle. This paper presents a novel planning framework, Multipolicy And Risk-aware Contingency planning (MARC), that systematically addresses these challenges by enhancing the multipolicy-based pipelines from both behavior and motion planning aspects. Specifically, MARC realizes a critical scenario set that reflects multiple possible futures conditioned on each semantic-level ego policy. Then, the generated policy-conditioned scenarios are further formulated into a tree-structured representation with a dynamic branchpoint based on the scene-level divergence. Moreover, to generate diverse driving maneuvers, we introduce risk-aware contingency planning, a bi-level optimization algorithm that simultaneously considers multiple future scenarios and user-defined risk tolerance levels. Owing to the more unified combination of behavior and motion planning layers, our framework achieves efficient decision-making and human-like driving maneuvers. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate superior performance to other strong baselines in various environments.