PC-Diffuser: Path-Consistent Capsule CBF Safety Filtering for Diffusion-Based Trajectory Planner

TL;DR

PC-Diffuser integrates a certifiable safety barrier directly into diffusion-based trajectory planning for autonomous driving, improving safety and robustness in complex scenarios by making safety intrinsic to trajectory generation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel safety augmentation framework that embeds path-consistent barrier functions into diffusion planning, enabling iterative, context-aware safety enforcement during trajectory generation.

Findings

Enhanced safety guarantees through certifiable barrier functions

Reduced conservativeness with capsule-distance risk evaluation

Maintained trajectory fidelity with path-consistent safety filtering

Abstract

Autonomous driving in complex traffic requires planners that generalize beyond hand-crafted rules, motivating data-driven approaches that learn behavior from expert demonstrations. Diffusion-based trajectory planners have recently shown strong closed-loop performance by iteratively denoising a full-horizon plan, but they remain difficult to certify and can fail catastrophically in rare or out-of-distribution scenarios. To address this challenge, we present PC-Diffuser, a safety augmentation framework that embeds a certifiable, path-consistent barrier-function structure directly into the denoising loop of diffusion planning. The key idea is to make safety an intrinsic part of trajectory generation rather than a post-hoc fix: we enforce forward invariance along the rollout while preserving the diffusion model's intended path geometry. Specifically, PC-Diffuser (i) evaluates collision risk using a capsule-distance barrier function that better reflects vehicle geometry and reduces unnecessary conservativeness, (ii) converts denoised waypoints into dynamically feasible motion under a kinematic bicycle model, and (iii) applies a path-consistent safety filter that eliminates residual constraint violations without geometric distortion, so the corrected plan remains close to the learned distribution. By injecting these safety-consistent corrections at every denoising step and feeding the refined trajectory back into the diffusion process, PC-Diffuser enables iterative, context-aware safeguarding instead of post-hoc repair...