ProDrive: Proactive Planning for Autonomous Driving via Ego-Environment Co-Evolution

Autonomous driving systems are steadily moving toward end-to-end paradigms to mitigate the limited adaptability of rule-based pipelines in complex traffic environments. However, most existing learning-based methods still make decisions from static representations of the current scene, without explicit future rollouts or modeling of the temporal causal dynamics in traffic interactions. This limitation often results in unstable or overly conservative planning under high-uncertainty conditions, such as occlusions and unexpected events. To overcome these challenges, we introduce OWMDrive, a generative end-to-end driving framework built upon an Occupancy World Model for multi-step 3D occupancy forecasting, which serves as a conditional prior to guide diffusion-based planning. Conditioned on both current observations and predicted future states, the planner iteratively refines trajectory candidates to generate a reinforced driving trajectory. By explicitly modeling scene evolution over future horizons, OWMDrive captures key spatiotemporal causal dependencies, which leads to more foresighted and robust trajectory generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OWMDrive significantly improves planning reliability and safety, especially in challenging and partially observable driving scenarios.

Current end-to-end autonomous driving planners are fundamentally reactive: they condition on historical and present observations to predict future actions. We argue that autonomous agents should instead imagine future scenes before deciding, just as human drivers mentally simulate what will happen next" before acting. We introduce ForeSight, a foundation world model centric planning framework that reframes autonomous driving as anticipatory decision-making. Rather than treating world models as auxiliary components, ForeSight makes future scene imagination the primary driver of action prediction. Our approach operates in two stages: (1) generating plausible future visual worlds via a pretrained world model, and (2) planning actions conditioned on these imagined futures. This paradigm shift from what should I do now?" to ``what will happen, and how should I respond?" enables genuinely anticipatory rather than reactive planning. By grounding decisions in anticipated contexts rather than present observations alone, ForeSight navigates dynamic, interactive scenarios more effectively. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM and nuScenes demonstrate that explicit future imagination significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art alternatives, validating our foresight-driven approach.

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.