Graph-Guided Safe Diffuser: Topological Graph Guidance for Safe Diffusion Planning

Abstract

Many diffusion-based planners enforce safety through inference-time guidance, but such interleaved trajectory deformations often degrade kinematic feasibility due to manifold rupture. We propose Graph-Guided Safe Diffuser (G2SD), a hierarchical framework that leverages a high-level topological graph planner to guide a low-level diffusion model. G2SD enforces safety at a structural level by abstracting the data manifold into a learned latent graph, on which high-level planning is performed. Continuous trajectories are generated by diffusion planners, which are conditioned on the graph node representations selected by the high-level planner. Theoretical analyses demonstrate conditions under which manifold rupture occurs in diffusion planners, and show that G2SD improves safety by reducing the constraint violation probability as the number of segments increases. Experiments demonstrate that G2SD substantially outperforms baselines, increasing goal-reaching rate without any collision from 40-50% to 98% in Maze2D navigation and also achieving superior task scores in locomotion.