Recently, world models have made significant progress in enhancing end-to-end driving systems through both future situation forecasting and improved scene understanding. However, existing driving world models are typically built upon dense scene representations, causing high computational costs and redundant information. In this paper, we present SparseWorld, a lightweight world model that focuses on predicting only the critical layout of the scene, enabling efficient future forecasting for end-to-end driving systems. SparseWorld first performs autoregressive rollout to forecast future map elements and surrounding agents, enabling the model to learn how driving scenarios evolve over time. It then leverages these predicted futures to refine downstream motion prediction and trajectory planning. Specifically, we propose a Sparse Dreamer that anticipates future instances in the latent space through joint temporal and spatial attention. By interacting with predicted future instances, the motion planner captures more accurate motion patterns and generates more informed and safety-aware trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SparseWorld significantly reduces collision risk and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the open-loop planning metrics of the nuScenes dataset with a collision rate of 0.05%. Moreover, it substantially outperforms the baseline method in closed-loop planning metrics on the Bench2Drive benchmark. Supplementary material is available at the project page: https://wryzju.github.io/SparseWorld/.
Data scaling plays a pivotal role in the pursuit of general intelligence. However, the prevailing perception-planning paradigm in autonomous driving relies heavily on expensive manual annotations to supervise trajectory planning, which severely limits its scalability. Conversely, although existing perception-free driving world models achieve impressive driving performance, their real-world reasoning ability for planning is solely built on next frame image forecasting. Due to the lack of enough supervision, these models often struggle with comprehensive scene understanding, resulting in unsatisfactory trajectory planning. In this paper, we propose EponaV2, a novel paradigm of driving world models, which achieves high-quality planning with comprehensive future reasoning. Inspired by how human drivers anticipate 3D geometry and semantics, we train our model to forecast more comprehensive future representations, which can be additionally decoded to future geometry and semantic maps. Extracting the 3D and semantic modalities enables our model to deeply understand the surrounding environment, and the future prediction task significantly enhances the real-world reasoning capabilities of EponaV2, ultimately leading to improved trajectory planning. Moreover, inspired by the training recipe of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a flow matching group relative policy optimization mechanism to further improve planning accuracy. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances of EponaV2 among perception-free models on three NAVSIM benchmarks (+1.3PDMS, +5.5EPDMS) demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.
World models have become central to autonomous driving, where accurate scene understanding and future prediction are crucial for safe control. Recent work has explored using vision-language models (VLMs) for planning, yet existing approaches typically treat perception, prediction, and planning as separate modules. We propose UniDrive-WM, a unified VLM-based world model that jointly performs driving-scene understanding, trajectory planning, and trajectory-conditioned future image generation within a single architecture. UniDrive-WM's trajectory planner predicts a future trajectory, which conditions a VLM-based image generator to produce plausible future frames. These predictions provide additional supervisory signals that enhance scene understanding and iteratively refine trajectory generation. We further compare discrete and continuous output representations for future image prediction, analyzing their influence on downstream driving performance. Experiments on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark show that UniDrive-WM produces high-fidelity future images and improves planning performance by 7.3% in L2 trajectory error and 10.4% in collision rate over the previous best method. These results demonstrate the advantages of tightly integrating VLM-driven reasoning, planning, and generative world modeling for autonomous driving. The project page is available at https://unidrive-wm.github.io/UniDrive-WM.
End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a compelling paradigm for learning planning directly from sensor observations, while recent world-model-based approaches further enrich this paradigm by enabling explicit reasoning about how the scene may evolve in the future. Yet future prediction alone does not guarantee better planning unless the predicted evolution can be converted into planning-relevant trajectory updates. Many current methods still forecast future scene states without explicitly decoding the motion implications hidden in state transitions. As a result, future reasoning often remains descriptively useful but only weakly coupled to executable motion generation. To address this limitation, we propose \mathbf{IDOL}, an inverse-dynamics-guided future prediction framework for world-model-based end-to-end planning in latent BEV space, where inverse dynamics serves as the key bridge between future prediction and trajectory optimization. IDOL first predicts multiple future latent scene states with a BEV world model, then applies an inverse dynamics model to adjacent latent futures to decode transition-aware trajectory features and recover planning-relevant motion deltas that explain how the latent world evolves over time. These inverse-dynamics-derived signals are used to optimize the planned trajectory, turning future forecasting from passive scene anticipation into actionable planning guidance. A lightweight closed-loop refinement module further improves long-horizon consistency by reusing the optimized trajectory for another round of future-aware reasoning. By introducing inverse dynamics into latent future reasoning, IDOL tightens the coupling between world modeling and planning. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM v1 and NAVSIM v2 benchmarks show that IDOL achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable methods.