# DriveGEN: Generalized and Robust 3D Detection in Driving via Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11122/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 54 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04596/) (2021)
- [Uni-ControlNet: All-in-One Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16322/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [BoxDiff: Text-to-Image Synthesis with Training-Free Box-Constrained Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10816/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Unleashing the Power of Chain-of-Prediction for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04594/) (2025)
- [Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: Frontiers and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08854/) (2025)
- [FutureX: Enhance End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Latent Chain-of-Thought World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11226/) (2025)
- [Veila: Panoramic LiDAR Generation from a Monocular RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03690/) (2025)
- [Towards Intrinsic-Aware Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27059/) (2026)
- [Adapt in the Wild: Test-Time Entropy Minimization with Sharpness and Feature Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04977/) (2025)
- [DriveFlow: Rectified Flow Adaptation for Robust 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18713/) (2025)
- [OmniLiDAR: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multi-Domain 3D LiDAR Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13815/) (2026)
- [Semantic Robustness Probing via Inpainting: An Interactive Tool for Safety-Critical Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27155/) (2026)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images with Diffusion-Guided Label Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18502/) (2025)
- [Thinking Ahead: Foresight Intelligence in MLLMs and World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18735/) (2025)
- [LSA: Localized Semantic Alignment for Enhancing Temporal Consistency in Traffic Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05966/) (2026)
- [ScenarioControl: Vision-Language Controllable Vectorized Latent Scenario Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17147/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In autonomous driving, vision-centric 3D detection aims to identify 3D objects from images. However, high data collection costs and diverse real-world scenarios limit the scale of training data. Once distribution shifts occur between training and test data, existing methods often suffer from performance degradation, known as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problems. To address this, controllable Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion offers a potential solution for training data enhancement, which is required to generate diverse OOD scenarios with precise 3D object geometry. Nevertheless, existing controllable T2I approaches are restricted by the limited scale of training data or struggle to preserve all annotated 3D objects. In this paper, we present DriveGEN, a method designed to improve the robustness of 3D detectors in Driving via Training-Free Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Generation. Without extra diffusion model training, DriveGEN consistently preserves objects with precise 3D geometry across diverse OOD generations, consisting of 2 stages: 1) Self-Prototype Extraction: We empirically find that self-attention features are semantic-aware but require accurate region selection for 3D objects. Thus, we extract precise object features via layouts to capture 3D object geometry, termed self-prototypes. 2) Prototype-Guided Diffusion: To preserve objects across various OOD scenarios, we perform semantic-aware feature alignment and shallow feature alignment during denoising. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveGEN in improving 3D detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Hongbin98/DriveGEN.