mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

AnchDrive: Bootstrapping Diffusion Policies with Hybrid Trajectory Anchors for End-to-End Driving

arXiv 2509.20253 ↗First posted 24 Sep 2025cs.RO cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end multi-modal planning has become a transformative paradigm in autonomous driving, effectively addressing behavioral multi-modality and the generalization challenge in long-tail scenarios. We propose AnchDrive, a framework for end-to-end driving that effectively bootstraps a diffusion policy to mitigate the high computational cost of traditional generative models. Rather than denoising from pure noise, AnchDrive initializes its planner with a rich set of hybrid trajectory anchors. These anchors are derived from two complementary sources: a static vocabulary of general driving priors and a set of dynamic, context-aware trajectories. The dynamic trajectories are decoded in real-time by a Transformer that processes dense and sparse perceptual features. The diffusion model then learns to refine these anchors by predicting a distribution of trajectory offsets, enabling fine-grained refinement. This anchor-based bootstrapping design allows for efficient generation of diverse, high-quality trajectories. Experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark confirm that AnchDrive sets a new state-of-the-art and shows strong generalizability

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 20 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2025.

Builds on

20 of 20 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving22 Nov
  2. 2023Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction20 Mar

Other references · 18

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  3. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  4. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
  5. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehiclescited by 493
  6. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 485
  7. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 354
  8. 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 289
  9. 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 249
  10. 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representationcited by 241
  11. 2022Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformercited by 212
  12. 2022Stochastic Trajectory Prediction via Motion Indeterminacy Diffusioncited by 185
6 more
  1. 2025Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 150
  2. 2022Learning from All Vehiclescited by 135
  3. 2025Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillationcited by 96
  4. 2025DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planningcited by 94
  5. 2025PRIX: Learning to Plan from Raw Pixels for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 16
  6. 2025SparseMeXT Unlocking the Potential of Sparse Representations for HD Map Constructioncited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025BridgeDrive: Diffusion Bridge Policy for Closed-Loop Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving
  2. 2025TransDiffuser: Diverse Trajectory Generation with Decorrelated Multi-modal Representation for End-to-end Autonomous Driving
  3. 2025DiffusionDriveV2: Reinforcement Learning-Constrained Truncated Diffusion Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  4. 2024Diffusion-ES: Gradient-free Planning with Diffusion for Autonomous Driving and Zero-Shot Instruction Following
  5. 2025TrajDiff: End-to-end Autonomous Driving without Perception Annotation
  6. 2025RealDrive: Retrieval-Augmented Driving with Diffusion Models
  7. 2026Multimodal Action Diffusion for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  8. 2026HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Driving