Muninn: Your Trajectory Diffusion Model But Faster
About
Diffusion-based trajectory planners can synthesize rich, multimodal robot motions, but their iterative denoising makes online planning and control prohibitively slow. Existing accelerations either modify the sampler or compress the network--sacrificing plan quality or requiring retraining without accounting for downstream control risk. We address the problem of making diffusion-based trajectory planners fast enough for real-time robot use without retraining the model or sacrificing trajectory quality, and in a way that works across diverse state-space diffusion architectures. Our key insight is that diffusion trajectory planners expose two signals we can exploit: a cheap probe of how their internal trajectory representation changes across steps, and analytic coefficients that describe how denoiser errors affect the sampler's state update. By calibrating the first signal against the second on offline runs, we obtain a per-step score that upper-bounds how far the final trajectory can deviate when we reuse a cached denoiser output, and we treat this bound as an uncertainty budget that we can spend over the denoising process. Building on this insight, we present Muninn, a training-free caching wrapper that tracks this uncertainty budget during sampling and, at each diffusion step, chooses between reusing a cached denoiser output when the predicted deviation is small and recomputing the denoiser when it is not. Across standard benchmarks Muninn delivers up to 4.6x wall-clock speedups across several trajectory diffusion models by reducing denoiser evaluations, while preserving task performance and safety metrics. Muninn further certifies that cached rollouts remain within a specified distance of their full-compute counterparts, and we validate these gains in real-time closed-loop navigation and manipulation hardware deployments. Project page: https://github.com/gokulp01/Muninn.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goal-reaching Navigation | D4RL Maze2D | D4RL Normalized Score160.2 | 10 | |
| Goal-reaching Navigation | D4RL AntMaze | Normalized Score (D4RL)75.9 | 10 | |
| MuJoCo locomotion | D4RL HalfCheetah | D4RL Normalized Score63.7 | 8 | |
| MuJoCo locomotion | D4RL hopper | D4RL Score75.7 | 8 | |
| MuJoCo locomotion | D4RL walker2d | D4RL Walker2d Score84 | 8 | |
| Long-horizon manipulation | D4RL FrankaKitchen | D4RL Normalized Score58.1 | 6 | |
| 2D marine navigation waypoint-following | SeaRobotics Surveyor ASV | Latency (ms)24 | 5 | |
| Robot block stacking | Kuka stacking | Success Rate60.4 | 4 | |
| Configuration-space motion planning | Arm planning in clutter easy | Success Rate99.4 | 4 | |
| Configuration-space motion planning | Arm planning in clutter med | Success Rate96.2 | 4 |