# DiffSemanticFusion: Semantic Raster BEV Fusion for Autonomous Driving via Online HD Map Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01778/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 45 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [End-to-end system architecture](https://mlsanity.com/driving/end-to-end-system-architecture/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11810/) (2021)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [Learning Lane Graph Representations for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13732/) (2020)
- [MOTR: End-to-End Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03247/) (2021)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (2024)
- [MapTR: Structured Modeling and Learning for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14437/) (2022)
- [DenseTNT: End-to-end Trajectory Prediction from Dense Goal Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09640/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Predictions for Autonomous Driving using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10732/) (2018)
- [VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13243/) (2024)
- [CoverNet: Multimodal Behavior Prediction using Trajectory Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10298/) (2019)
- [Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06978/) (2024)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)
- [MotionDiffuser: Controllable Multi-Agent Motion Prediction using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03083/) (2023)
- [MapTRv2: An End-to-End Framework for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05736/) (2023)
- [Guided Conditional Diffusion for Controllable Traffic Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17366/) (2022)
- [Sparse4D: Multi-view 3D Object Detection with Sparse Spatial-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10581/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01941/) (2025)
- [StreamMapNet: Streaming Mapping Network for Vectorized Online HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12570/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [IRL-VLA: Training an Vision-Language-Action Policy via Reward World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06571/) (2025)
- [FlowDrive: Energy Flow Field for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14303/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving requires accurate scene understanding, including road geometry, traffic agents, and their semantic relationships. In online HD map generation scenarios, raster-based representations are well-suited to vision models but lack geometric precision, while graph-based representations retain structural detail but become unstable without precise maps. To harness the complementary strengths of both, we propose DiffSemanticFusion -- a fusion framework for multimodal trajectory prediction and planning. Our approach reasons over a semantic raster-fused BEV space, enhanced by a map diffusion module that improves both the stability and expressiveness of online HD map representations. We validate our framework on two downstream tasks: trajectory prediction and planning-oriented end-to-end autonomous driving. Experiments on real-world autonomous driving benchmarks, nuScenes and NAVSIM, demonstrate improved performance over several state-of-the-art methods. For the prediction task on nuScenes, we integrate DiffSemanticFusion with the online HD map informed QCNet, achieving a 5.1% performance improvement. For end-to-end autonomous driving in NAVSIM, DiffSemanticFusion achieves state-of-the-art results, with a 15% performance gain in NavHard scenarios. In addition, extensive ablation and sensitivity studies show that our map diffusion module can be seamlessly integrated into other vector-based approaches to enhance performance. All artifacts are available at https://github.com/SunZhigang7/DiffSemanticFusion.