Abstract: In various examples, policy planning using behavior models for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems and applications is described herein. Systems and methods are disclosed that determine a policy for navigating a vehicle, such as a semi-autonomous vehicle or an autonomous vehicle (or other machine), where the policy allows for multistage reasoning that leverages future reactive behaviors of one or more other objects. For instance, a first behavior model (e.g., a trajectory tree) may be generated that represents candidate trajectories for the vehicle and one or more second behavior models (e.g., one or more scenario trees) may be generated that respectively represent future behaviors of the other object(s). The first behavior model and the second behavior model(s) may then be processed, such as in a closed-loop simulation based on a realistic data-driven traffic model, to determine the policy for navigating the vehicle.

Abstract: In various examples, a motion planner include an analytical function to predict motion plans for a machine based on predicted trajectories of actors in an environment, where the predictions are differentiable with respect to parameters of a neural network of a motion predictor used to predict the trajectories. The analytical function may be used to determine candidate trajectories for the machine based on a predicted trajectory, to compute cost values for the candidate trajectories, and to select a reference trajectory from the candidate trajectories. For differentiability, a term of the analytical function may correspond to the predicted trajectory. A motion controller may use the reference trajectory to predict a control sequence for the machine using an analytical function trained to generate predictions that are differentiable with respect to at least one parameter of the analytical function used to compute the cost values.