End-to-end Conditional Diffusion for Realistic and Controllable Visual Traffic Scenario Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18637v1
• Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2026 02:13:25 GMT
• Title: End-to-end Conditional Diffusion for Realistic and Controllable Visual Traffic Scenario Generation
• Abstract summary: E2E-CDiff is an end-to-end conditional diffusion framework for controllable and realistic scenario generation.<n>Differentiable guidance regulates speed, enforces drivable-area compliance, and supports collision-avoidance or collision-seeking behaviors.<n>E2E-CDiff also performs competitively as a learning-based ego planner.
• Score: 59.188006170485046
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Generating closed-loop traffic scenarios that are both realistic and controllable is crucial for evaluating autonomous driving systems, especially under rare safety-critical interactions. Existing learning-based methods often struggle to balance controllability and realism, offering either limited fine-grained control over traffic behavior or controllable scenarios at the expense of behavioral plausibility. This paper presents E2E-CDiff, an end-to-end conditional diffusion framework for controllable and realistic scenario generation. Conditioned on front-view visual observations, E2E-CDiff jointly denoises future motion states and executable low-level controls for route-interacting background vehicles. This unified state-action generation mitigates the planning-control mismatch in conventional two-stage trajectory-then-controller pipelines. Differentiable guidance further regulates speed, enforces drivable-area compliance, and supports collision-avoidance or collision-seeking behaviors, enabling both naturalistic and safety-critical scenario generation. Experiments on Bench2Drive show that E2E-CDiff achieves a favorable controllability-realism trade-off compared with representative reinforcement- and imitation-learning baselines, while its collision-guided variant induces challenging interactions across multiple autonomous driving systems. E2E-CDiff also performs competitively as a learning-based ego planner, demonstrating the generality of end-to-end state-action diffusion.

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