Sample-efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is often limited by the trade-off between data efficiency and model bias. While world models reduce the reliance on costly environment interactions, policy optimization over learned dynamics remains sensitive to prediction errors. This paper proposes the Dreamer-SAC framework, which integrates a recurrent state-space world model with an off-policy soft actor-critic algorithm trained directly in latent space. The framework uses a combination of real interactions and short-horizon generated trajectories with n-step target estimation and multi-objective supervision. Evaluated in autonomous driving scenarios with objectives encompassing driving efficiency and safety, the proposed framework consistently outperforms representative reinforcement learning baselines, including DreamerV3, SAC, and PPO, while achieving improved performance with substantially fewer real environment interactions. Experiments reveal an inverted-U relationship between rollout horizon and policy performance, where short-horizon latent rollouts achieve the best trade-off between additional training signals and accumulated model bias. Furthermore, n-step target estimation demonstrates more effectiveness over one-step temporal-difference targets in exploiting predicted experience for value learning.
Autonomous driving requires long-horizon closedloop decision making in dynamic traffic environments. Latent world models offer an effective framework for this problem by enabling imagination-based decision making in compact latent spaces. However, multi-source observations contain controlirrelevant redundancy, whereas reliable driving decisions rely on risk-relevant relations, future dynamics, and continuous action adjustments. This mismatch makes observation reconstruction and absolute action modeling suboptimal for learning decisionrelevant latent dynamics. We propose LIDAR-AD, a decoderfree Latent-Interaction Dreamer with Action-Residual Chains for autonomous driving. LIDAR-AD replaces observation reconstruction with redundancy-reduced latent alignment, encouraging compact representations of risk-relevant relations in multi-source driving inputs. It further models vehicle control as residual action updates and uses residual-action sequence contrastive learning to align multi-step residual-driven rollouts with future latent states. A deterministic analysis shows that the latent-tanh residual parameterization preserves interior action reachability while representing smooth long-horizon control as compact local updates. Together, these designs improve risk-aware state abstraction, continuous-control modeling, and long-horizon dynamics prediction. Extensive experiments across diverse simulated driving scenarios demonstrate that LIDAR-AD consistently outperforms world-model baselines, achieving the highest reward and the best success rate among learning-based methods. Evaluations on nuPlan-derived log-reconstructed scenarios further demonstrate the transferability of LIDAR-AD under real-world traffic layouts.
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.
End-to-end autonomous driving requires generalization ability across platforms with dissimilar physical characteristics. The chassis defines the physical embodiment of each platform, and real-world fleets span sub-tonne microcars to bus-class vehicles. Consequently, the driving stack must either be retrained per platform or adapt to the underlying chassis dynamics online. World model (WM)-based reinforcement learning offers a sample-efficient path toward end-to-end autonomous driving on egocentric bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations, but its effectiveness hinges on how faithfully the WM captures the ego vehicle's dynamics. This work identifies a structural bottleneck in BEV-based WMs: observation transitions entangle ego-motion with scene dynamics, consuming modeling capacity at the cost of imagination accuracy. This burden is embodiment-dependent: dissimilar chassis produce different observation warps under the same control input. The proposed DynaDreamer addresses this bottleneck by conditioning the WM's latent distributions on a physics-informed ego-dynamics context derived from a lateral dynamics model with a neural tire force formulation. This context is extracted online via a neural-ODE encoder-decoder that simultaneously identifies the underlying chassis parameters. Information-theoretic analysis confirms that this conditioning removes the ego-motion terms from both the WM's transition entropy and its prior-posterior KL divergence. The identified physical parameterization enables zero-shot cross-embodiment adaptation across a dynamically diverse fleet without per-platform retraining. Simulation results show 28% and 43% improvements in driving task success rates over the strongest baseline in urban and highway scenarios, and the advantage over the base Transformer WM reaches up to 73% when extrapolating to unseen chassis.