Recently, world models have been incorporated into the autonomous driving systems to improve the planning reliability. Existing approaches typically predict future states through appearance generation or deterministic regression, which limits their ability to capture trajectory-conditioned scene evolution and leads to unreliable action planning. To address this, we propose DynFlowDrive, a latent world model that leverages flow-based dynamics to model the transition of world states under different driving actions. By adopting the rectifiedflow formulation, the model learns a velocity field that describes how the scene state changes under different driving actions, enabling progressive prediction of future latent states. Building upon this, we further introduce a stability-aware multi-mode trajectory selection strategy that evaluates candidate trajectories according to the stability of the induced scene transitions. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and NavSim benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse driving frameworks without introducing additional inference overhead. Source code will be abaliable at https://github.com/xiaolul2/DynFlowDrive.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: (a) Comparisons of perception-based and latent world model-based approaches on nuScenes and NavSim benchmarks. (b) Planning visualization on the front view and bird’s-eye-view (BEV) space. Our DynFlowDrive achieves comparable performance.
Figure 2: Comparison between (a) the existing static world model and (b) the dynamic latent world model of our DynFlowDrive . Instead of the static regression of next-frame latents, we propose the dynamic modeling that learns a continuous velocity field vθ to capture the evolution of world transitions.
Figure 3: Overview of DynFlowDrive. Given current observations, multi-mode trajectories are firstly generated by the standard planning module. A flow-based dynamic latent world model is incorporated to simulate the progressive future evolution in latent space. The resulting dynamics are used by a stability-aware multi-mode selection module, which assess the trajectory based on reconstruction quality and flow-based stability, enabling reliable supervision and improved planning robustness.
Figure 4: The architecture of our dynamic latent world model design , in which the velocity field vθ is learnt to capture the trajectory-conditioned dynamics transitions in the latent space.
Figure 5: Stability-aware Multi-mode Selection. For training, the score head is supervised by the stable criterion. For Inference, the best mode trajectory is selected according to the highest score index.
Method
Pub.
BEV
L2 (m) ↓
Collision Rate (%) ↓
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
Perception-based Approaches
ST-P3 [ 17 ]
ECCV 2022
✓
1.33
2.11
2.90
2.11
0.23
0.62
1.27
0.71
UniAD [ 19 ]
CVPR 2023
✓
0.48
0.96
1.65
1.03
0.05
0.17
0.71
0.31
VAD-Tiny [ 20 ]
ICCV 2023
✓
0.46
0.76
1.12
0.78
0.21
0.35
0.58
0.38
VAD-Base [ 20 ]
ICCV 2023
✓
0.41
0.70
1.05
0.72
0.07
0.17
0.41
0.22
Table 1: Comparison of the SOTA methods on the nuScenes dataset. “ ∗ ” denotes the re-implemented result from SSR [ 23 ] by official public codes. “ ⋄ ” denotes using ego status in the planning module following BEVPlanner++ [ 30 ] . Evaluations are conducted in the same way as the settings in VAD [ 20 ] . Our DynFLowDrive are implemented based on LAW [ 24 ] and SSR. LAW adopts Swin-Tiny [ 38 ] as image backbone, while others adopt ResNet-50 [ 15 ] .
Figure 6: Visualization of Planning Results on nuScenese dataset. The perception representations are rendered from annotations. Surrounding light lines denote the maps of the scene, while black boxes represent the object detection. The ego vehicle is drawn by the green box in the center.
Method
Input
#Traj.
Traj. Eval.
NC ↑
DAC ↑
EP ↑
TTC ↑
Comf. ↑
PDMS ↑
Human
-
-
-
100
100
87.5
100
99.9
94.8
Constant Velocity
-
1
✗
69.9
58.8
49.3
49.3
100.0
21.6
Ego Status MLP
-
1
✗
93.0
77.3
62.8
83.6
100.0
65.6
VADv2 [ 4 ]
C
8192
Rule-based
97.9
91.7
77.6
92.9
100.0
83.0
UniAD [ 19 ]
C
1
Rule-based
97.8
91.9
78.8
92.9
100.0
83.4
LTF [ 41 ]
C
1
✗
97.4
92.8
79.0
92.4
100.0
83.8
Table 2: Comparison with the SOTA approaches on the NavSim test set. C: Camera. L: LiDAR. Rule-based means that trajectory evaluation follows specific rules. Model-free represents the evaluation without world modeling. Model-based denotes evaluating the trajectory with the assistance of the world model.
Modules
L2 (m) ↓
CR (%) ↓
FPS ↑
Static-WM
Dyn-WM
MS
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
-
-
-
0.31
0.63
1.12
0.69
0.19
0.27
0.64
0.37
13.8
✓
-
-
0.26
0.57
1.01
0.61
0.14
0.21
0.54
0.30
13.8
-
✓
-
0.26
0.55
0.94
0.59
0.11
0.16
0.51
0.26
13.8
-
-
✓
0.25
0.55
0.93
0.58
0.11
0.15
0.49
0.25
13.6
-
✓
✓
0.24
0.54
0.92
0.57
0.10
0.12
0.45
0.22
13.6
Table 3: Component-wise Ablation. Static-WM and Dyn-WM mean the existing stable world model design and our flow-based dynamic modeling. MS denotes the strategy of stability-aware multi-mode selection. FPS are measured on one RTX 4090.
World Model Design
L2 (m) ↓
CR (%) ↓
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
1s
2s
3s
Avg.
Static WM
0.26
0.57
1.01
0.61
0.14
0.21
0.54
0.30
Flow WM
0.26
0.55
0.94
0.59
0.11
0.16
0.51
0.26
+ World Feat. Design
0.24
0.54
0.92
0.57
0.10
0.12
0.45
0.22
Table 4: Ablations on the Dynamic Latent World Model Design.
Table 5: Ablations on Flow Steps and Multi-Mode Selection Strategies.
World models offer a promising paradigm for autonomous driving by predicting how traffic scenes may evolve and using such predictions to support action generation. However, existing approaches either separate future prediction from action generation or jointly predict them at the same temporal scale, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve long-horizon anticipation and responsive, observation-grounded decision making. We present Drive-HWM, a hierarchical slow--fast world modeling framework that organizes future representation prediction and action generation at complementary temporal scales. The slow world model predicts multi-step future representations to capture extended scene evolution. To explicitly model the abundant motion dynamics in driving environments, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Latents learned through optical-flow prediction. Guided by these future representations, the fast model uses a lightweight multimodal backbone and an autoregressive expert to jointly predict the next frame and the immediate action from the latest observation. Next-frame prediction encourages the fast model to capture imminent scene evolution, while one-step action generation allows decisions to be continuously updated as new observations arrive. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM v1 and v2 demonstrate the strong driving performance of Drive-HWM. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the hierarchical slow--fast design, dynamics-aware future representations, and joint next-frame and action prediction.
Zhaoxin Fan, Tianbao Zhang, Wenjun Wu +5
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Dim12 AI +3
Existing latent world models for autonomous driving have opened a promising path toward future-aware driving intelligence. However, they typically treat future latent states as prediction targets or auxiliary signals, rather than directly conditioning trajectory planning. This can entangle current and future features in latent space. In this work, we propose DriveFuture, a future-aware latent world modeling framework for autonomous driving that explicitly learns planning-oriented foresight by conditioning the current latent state modeling process on future world states. Specifically, during training, the model first predicts future latent world states from the current latent state and ego action, and then refines the prediction against the ground-truth future latent state via cross-attention. The resulting future-aware latent serves as an explicit condition for a diffusion-based trajectory planner. During inference, DriveFuture conditions on the predicted future latent state instead of the ground-truth future state. DriveFuture achieves SOTA performance on the public NAVSIM benchmarks, reaching 55.5 EPDMS on NAVSIM-v2 {\textcolor{blue}{navhard}}, 89.9 EPDMS on NAVSIM-v2 {\textcolor{blue}{navtest}}, and 90.7 PDMS on NAVSIM-v1 {\textcolor{blue}{navtest}}, respectively. These results suggest that the key to latent world modeling lies not merely in simulating future states, but more importantly in conditioning current decision-making on future states. Notably, as of April 2026, DriveFuture ranks 1st on the \href{https://huggingface.co/spaces/AGC2025/e2e-driving-navhard}{NAVSIM-v2 {\textcolor{blue}{navhard}}} leaderboard and achieves SOTA performance on \href{https://huggingface.co/spaces/AGC2024-P/e2e-driving-navtest}{NAVSIM-v1 {\textcolor{blue}{navtest}}}.
Yufeng Hong, Xiaotian Zhou, Yingyan Li +6
Beijing Institute of Technology · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beihang University +5
Generalization is a central challenge in autonomous driving, as real-world deployment requires robust performance under unseen scenarios, sensor domains, and environmental conditions. Recent world-model-based planning methods have shown strong capabilities in scene understanding and multi-modal future prediction, yet their generalization across datasets and sensor configurations remains limited. In addition, their loosely coupled planning paradigm often leads to poor video-trajectory consistency during visual imagination. To overcome these limitations, we propose DriveVA, a novel autonomous driving world model that jointly decodes future visual forecasts and action sequences in a shared latent generative process. DriveVA inherits rich priors on motion dynamics and physical plausibility from well-pretrained large-scale video generation models to capture continuous spatiotemporal evolution and causal interaction patterns. To this end, DriveVA employs a DiT-based decoder to jointly predict future action sequences (trajectories) and videos, enabling tighter alignment between planning and scene evolution. We also introduce a video continuation strategy to strengthen long-duration rollout consistency. DriveVA achieves an impressive PDM-based planning performance of 90.9 PDM score on the NAVSIM benchmark. Extensive experiments also demonstrate the zero-shot capability and cross-domain generalization of DriveVA, which reduces average L2 error and collision rate by 78.9% and 83.3% on nuScenes and 52.5% and 52.4% on the Bench2Drive built on CARLA v2 compared with the state-of-the-art world-model-based planner.
Mengmeng Liu, Diankun Zhang, Jiuming Liu +7
University of Twente, The Netherlands · Xiaomi EV, China · University of Cambridge, United Kingdom +1