Learning Direct Control Policies with Flow Matching for Autonomous Driving

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14832v1
• Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 13:37:48 GMT
• Title: Learning Direct Control Policies with Flow Matching for Autonomous Driving
• Abstract summary: Flow-matching planner for autonomous driving generates actionable trajectories defined by acceleration and curvature.<n>Model is conditioned on a bird's-eye-view (BEV) control profiles of the surrounding scene.<n>We train exclusively on urban scenarios collected from a 2D traffic simulator with reactive agents.
• Score: 32.505127447635864
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We present a flow-matching planner for autonomous driving that directly outputs actionable control trajectories defined by acceleration and curvature profiles. The model is conditioned on a bird's-eye-view (BEV) raster of the surrounding scene and generates control sequences in a small number of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) integration steps, enabling low-latency inference suitable for real-time closed-loop re-planning. We train exclusively on urban scenarios (real urban city streets, intersections and roundabouts of the city of Parma, Italy) collected from a 2D traffic simulator with reactive agents, and evaluate in closed-loop on both in-distribution and markedly out-of-distribution environments, including multi-lane highways and unseen urban scenarios. Our results show that the model generalizes reliably to these unseen conditions, maintaining stable closed-loop control and successfully completing scenarios that differ substantially from the training distribution. We attribute this to the BEV representation, which provides a geometry-centric view of the scene that is inherently less sensitive to distributional shifts, and to the flow-matching formulation, which learns a smooth vector field that degrades gracefully under distribution shift. We provide video demonstrations of closed-loop behavior at https://marcelloceresini.github.io/DirectControlFlowMatching.

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