# Motion Planning in Compressed Representation Spaces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11838/) (2024)
- [Large Scale Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving : The Waymo Open Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10133/) (2021)
- [NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11810/) (2021)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [Universal Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07121/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth 32 Tokens for Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07550/) (2024)
- [VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08583/) (2022)
- [Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13508/) (2022)
- [Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07962/) (2023)
- [MotionDiffuser: Controllable Multi-Agent Motion Prediction using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03083/) (2023)
- [Guided Conditional Diffusion for Controllable Traffic Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17366/) (2022)
- [GameFormer: Game-theoretic Modeling and Learning of Transformer-based Interactive Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05760/) (2023)
- [On the Pitfalls of Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Estimation with Probabilistic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09168/) (2022)
- [FlexTok: Resampling Images into 1D Token Sequences of Flexible Length](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13967/) (2025)
- [Learning Ordered Representations with Nested Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.0915/) (2014)
- [Efficient Planning in a Compact Latent Action Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10291/) (2022)
- [Vector Quantized Models for Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04615/) (2021)
- [One-D-Piece: Image Tokenizer Meets Quality-Controllable Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10064/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Masked Generative Motion Planning with Geometry-Guided Token Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10646/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning methods have vastly expanded the capabilities of motion planning in robotics applications, as learning priors from large-scale data has been shown to be essential in capturing the highly complex behavior required for solving tasks such as manipulation or navigation for autonomous vehicles. At the same time, model-based planning algorithms based on search or optimization remain an essential tool due to their flexibility, efficiency, and the ability to incorporate domain knowledge via expert-designed algorithms and objective functions. We propose a new generative framework to unify these two paradigms. First, we learn an autoencoder with a high compression ratio and a latent space of hierarchically ordered, discrete-valued tokens. Leveraging both the dimensionality reduction and the hierarchical coarse-to-fine structure learned by this autoencoder, we then perform motion planning by directly searching in the latent space of tokens. This search can optimize arbitrary objective functions specified at test time, providing a large degree of flexibility while maintaining efficiency and producing realistic solutions by relying on the generative capabilities of the highly compressed autoencoder. We evaluate our method on nuPlan and the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, showing how latent space search can be used for a variety of guided behavior generation tasks, achieving strong performance for closed-loop motion planning and multi-agent guided scenario synthesis without requiring any task-specific training.