Flow-ERD: Agent-type Aware Flow Matching with Entropy-Regularized Distillation for Diverse Traffic Simulation

Realistic and diverse traffic simulation is essential to autonomous driving development. Yet prevailing benchmarks predominantly reward realism, and recent methods have optimized accordingly, leaving diversity underexplored.

We introduce Flow-ERD, a multi-agent simulator that pursues realism and diversity jointly. Its backbone, Agent-Type Aware Flow Matching (AFM), couples flow matching's multi-modal expressiveness with type-specific kinematic execution. It preserves fine-grained diversity while keeping motions consistent with each agent type.

A second stage, Entropy-Regularized Distillation (ERD), fine-tunes the closed-loop rollout distribution with an entropy-regularized reverse-KL objective. This mitigates covariate shift while explicitly preventing collapse onto high-density modes.

We evaluate Flow-ERD with a log-free diversity metric alongside standard realism scores. Flow-ERD ranks first on the WOSAC test benchmark and dominates the realism--diversity Pareto front among reproducible baselines.

Our project page is available here.