Flow Matching-Based Autonomous Driving Planning with Advanced Interactive Behavior Modeling

Abstract

Modeling interactive driving behaviors in complex scenarios remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous driving planning. Learning-based approaches attempt to address this challenge with advanced generative models, removing the dependency on over-engineered architectures for representation fusion. However, brute-force implementation by simply stacking transformer blocks lacks a dedicated mechanism for modeling interactive behaviors that is common in real driving scenarios. The scarcity of interactive driving data further exacerbates this problem, leaving conventional imitation learning methods ill-equipped to capture high-value interactive behaviors. We propose Flow Planner, which tackles these problems through coordinated innovations in data modeling, model architecture, and learning scheme. Specifically, we first introduce fine-grained trajectory tokenization, which decomposes the trajectory into overlapping segments to decrease the complexity of whole trajectory modeling. With a sophisticatedly designed architecture, we achieve efficient temporal and spatial fusion of planning and scene information, to better capture interactive behaviors. In addition, the framework incorporates flow matching with classifier-free guidance for multi-modal behavior generation, which dynamically reweights agent interactions during inference to maintain coherent response strategies, providing a critical boost for interactive scenario understanding. Experimental results on the large-scale nuPlan dataset demonstrate that Flow Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance among learning-based approaches while effectively modeling interactive behaviors in complex driving scenarios.

Publication
In the Thirty-Ninth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
Tianyi Tan
Tianyi Tan
Research Intern
Yinan Zheng
Yinan Zheng
PhD Student
Ruiming Liang
Ruiming Liang
Research Intern
Kexin Zheng
Kexin Zheng
Research Intern

Undergrad student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Jinliang Zheng
Jinliang Zheng
PhD Student
Jianxiong Li
Jianxiong Li
PhD Candidate
Xianyuan Zhan
Xianyuan Zhan
Faculty Member