Enhanced Safety in Autonomous Driving: Integrating a Latent State Diffusion Model for End-to-End Navigation

Abstract

Ensuring safety in autonomous driving is crucial for effective motion planning and navigation. However, most end-to-end planning methodologies lack sufficient safety measures. This study tackles this issue by formulating the control optimization problem in autonomous driving as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). We introduce an innovative, model-based approach for policy optimization, employing a conditional Value-at-Risk (VaR)-based soft actor-critic (SAC) to handle constraints in complex, high-dimensional state spaces. Our method features a worst-case actor to ensure strict compliance with safety requirements, even in unpredictable scenarios. The policy optimization leverages the augmented Lagrangian method and leverages latent diffusion models to forecast and simulate future trajectories. This dual strategy ensures safe navigation through environments and enhances policy performance by incorporating distribution modeling to address environmental uncertainties. Empirical evaluations conducted in both simulated and real environments demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing methods in terms of safety, efficiency, and decision-making capabilities.