SafeDiffuser: Safe Planning with Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Authors: name: Wei Xiao, name: Tsun-Hsuan Wang, name: Chuang Gan, name: Daniela Rus

Diffusion model-based approaches have shown promise in data-driven planning,
but there are no safety guarantees, thus making it hard to be applied for
safety-critical applications. To address these challenges, we propose a new
method, called SafeDiffuser, to ensure diffusion probabilistic models satisfy
specifications by using a class of control barrier functions. The key idea of
our approach is to embed the proposed finite-time diffusion invariance into the
denoising diffusion procedure, which enables trustworthy diffusion data
generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that our finite-time diffusion invariance
method through generative models not only maintains generalization performance
but also creates robustness in safe data generation. We test our method on a
series of safe planning tasks, including maze path generation, legged robot
locomotion, and 3D space manipulation, with results showing the advantages of
robustness and guarantees over vanilla diffusion models.