Horizon-Coupled Obstacle Guidance for Relative-Action Diffusion Policies
Real-world robot deployment requires adapting learned policies to unseen obstacles without collecting new demonstrations or retraining. Existing policy-level guidance often applies obstacle corrections independently at individual horizon steps, which may address local obstacle violations but fail to coordinate the action sequence into a complete, task-directed detour. How obstacle responses should be propagated across the action horizon to coordinate complete, task-directed avoidance motion remains underexplored. We introduce an inferencetime obstacle-guidance framework for pretrained relative-action diffusion policies. It rolls out cumulative relative actions into a workspace trajectory, evaluates obstacle interactions along the trajectory with an SDF-based obstacle model, and propagates each obstacle response to all contributing action increments during denoising. Real-robot experiments across seven obstacleconstrained scenarios spanning four manipulation tasks show that our method achieves 105/140 (75.0%) collision-free task successes, compared with 8/140 (5.7%) for absolute-action pointwise guidance. Ablations show that the relative-action horizoncoupled formulation provides the larger observed improvement across both obstacle models.