WA-JEPA: Rethinking the Video JEPA Paradigm for World-Action Modeling in Autonomous Driving

Existing autonomous-driving world models typically perform dense prediction of future videos, occupancy states, BEV representations, or agent motion. We argue that planning need not reconstruct the complete future world, but only focus on scene features that affect future ego action. Based on this perspective, we propose Auto-JEPA, an action-oriented latent world model that learns continuous future driving intent through joint-embedding prediction. Given visual observations, egomotion history, and navigation commands, Auto-JEPA predicts an intent embedding aligned with the latent representation of the future ego trajectory. The predicted intent retrieves executable trajectories from a fixed trajectory memory, which are then ranked by a scene-conditioned candidate selection module. Auto-JEPA keeps the visual encoder frozen, requires no explicit perception annotations, and uses no learned trajectory generator. By optimizing only task-specific modules for trajectory representation, intent prediction, and candidate selection, Auto-JEPA achieves 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 89.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2. Semantic occlusion experiments show that masking dynamic-agent regions induces an average intent change 2.97x that of equal-area random masking. Moreover, occluding vehicles that affect future driving substantially changes the predicted intent and selected trajectory, whereas both remain essentially unchanged when non-influential vehicles are occluded. These results show that future-intent prediction encourages the model to focus on planning-relevant visual features and supports high-quality planning without dense future-world modeling.

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.

End-to-end autonomous driving increasingly leverages self-supervised video pretraining to learn transferable planning representations. However, pretraining video world models for scene understanding has so far brought only limited improvements. This limitation is compounded by the inherent ambiguity of driving: each scene typically provides only a single human trajectory, making it difficult to learn multimodal behaviors. In this work, we propose Drive-JEPA, a framework that integrates Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) with multimodal trajectory distillation for end-to-end driving. First, we adapt V-JEPA for end-to-end driving, pretraining a ViT encoder on large-scale driving videos to produce predictive representations aligned with trajectory planning. Second, we introduce a proposal-centric planner that distills diverse simulator-generated trajectories alongside human trajectories, with a momentum-aware selection mechanism to promote stable and safe behavior. When evaluated on NAVSIM, the V-JEPA representation combined with a simple transformer-based decoder outperforms prior methods by 3 PDMS in the perception-free setting. The complete Drive-JEPA framework achieves 93.3 PDMS on v1 and 87.8 EPDMS on v2, setting a new state-of-the-art.