We present a data-driven framework for reachability analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems that requires no explicit model. A denoising diffusion probabilistic model learns the time-evolving state distribution of a dynamical system from trajectory data alone. The predicted reachable set takes the form of a sublevel set of a nonconformity score derived from the reconstruction error, with the threshold calibrated via the Learn Then Test procedure so that the probability of excluding a reachable state is bounded with high probability. Experiments on three nonlinear systems, a forced Duffing oscillator, a planar quadrotor, and a high-dimensional reaction-diffusion system, confirm that the empirical miss rate remains below the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bound while scaling to state dimensions beyond the reach of classical grid-based and polynomial methods.
@article{arxiv.2604.00283,
title = {Data-Driven Reachability Analysis via Diffusion Models with PAC Guarantees},
author = {Yanliang Huang and Peng Xie and Wenyuan Wu and Zhuoqi Zeng and Amr Alanwar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00283},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
8 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the 65th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2026)