World models are emerging as a fundamental component of policy learning for real-world agents, enabling agents to predict future world states and plan actions within a learned representation of the dynamic environment. Existing approaches, however, often model appearance, metric geometry represented by projected LiDAR depth, and ego motion either partially or independently, overlooking the fact that these modalities are different projections of a shared underlying world state. This separation can lead to information loss and cross-modal inconsistency, ultimately limiting downstream performance. Motivated by this unified view of the world, we propose DriveUniTok, a unified multimodal tokenizer for driving world-action models (WAMs) that encodes these modalities in a single decodable continuous latent. We freeze DriveUniTok and adapt a pretrained diffusion model, DriveUniWAM, to predict future unified latents; the tokenizer then decodes them into future appearance, projected LiDAR depth, and ego trajectories. Experiments on NAVSIM demonstrate that our unified design achieves better future prediction and planning performance at lower downstream computational cost than separate-stream alternatives. With reinforcement learning post-training, DriveUniWAM achieves a PDMS of 91.54, reaching state-of-the-art performance among the evaluated WAM-based planners.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Comparison of latent representations for world-action modeling. (a) BEV tokenizers fuse RGB and LiDAR into a visual latent, while (b) Occupancy tokenizers represent the scene with an occupancy latent; both keep ego motion separate. (c) Modality-specific tokenizers encode RGB, LiDAR, and ego motion into separate streams. (d) DriveUniTok jointly encodes RGB, LiDAR-derived geometry, and ego motion into one unified latent.
Figure 2: DriveUniTok architecture. (a) Encoder. RGB, projected depth, and ego pose are fused into S shared queries, whose T per-frame states are compressed into one latent. (b) Decoder. The latent is expanded back to T frame positions, and each target is read out through its own set of mask tokens, including a training-only semantic branch. Snowflakes mark frozen components, and all remaining modules are trained.
Figure 3: Training and policy optimization with DriveUniWAM. (a) Supervised training. DriveUniWAM forecasts the future latents with flow matching. (b) Reinforcement learning. Per scene, a group of sampled futures is decoded into trajectories and scored by the NAVSIM PDM reward, whose relative advantages drive the Flow-GRPO update. DriveUniTok stays frozen in both stages.
Tokenizer configuration
NAVSIM navtest
Method
Comp.
Dim.
LPIPS VGG↓
LPIPS DINO↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
rFVD I3D↓
rFVD VJ↓
Large-Scale Pretrained Video Tokenizers
Wan2.1 VAE ( Team Wan et al., 2025 )
4×8×8
16
0.1151
0.0649
31.50
0.8819
2.06
1.0984
Wan2.2 VAE ( Team Wan et al., 2025 )
4×16×16
48
0.1081
0.0608
31.35
0.8775
2.98
0.7958
HunyuanVideo VAE ( Kong et al., 2024 )
4×8×8
16
0.1230
0.0573
32.36
0.8924
4.03
0.6278
CogVideoX VAE ( Yang et al., 2025 )
4×8×8
16
0.1401
0.0943
32.26
0.8909
5.09
0.9298
Table 1: Native-configuration comparison of video tokenizers on NAVSIM navtest. Comp. reports native temporal × height × width compression for grid tokenizers and tokens per clip for token-sequence methods; for DriveUniTok, it denotes the complete 584-token multimodal clip latent. The baselines use their official RGB-only preprocessing, whereas DriveUniTok additionally encodes projected depth and ego pose with a frozen DINOv3-L feature backbone. Results characterize fidelity–compression trade-offs under each tokenizer’s native configuration.
Representation budget
Efficiency
Reconstruction
Future prediction
Planning
Representation
Tokens
Scalars
Len.
Tok. params (M)
Tok. cost
DiT/step cost
LPIPS DINO
AbsRel
ADE
gFVD VJ
AbsRel
ADE
PDMS
Separate, natural budget
1,160
18,560
3,480
957.8
4.6
34.2
0.1083
0.0723
0.0702
7.92
0.1194
0.3997
90.1
Separate, equal budget
584
9,344
1,752
956.6
4.3
16.3
0.1124
0.0766
0.0720
12.80
0.1850
0.4186
87.5
Unified (DriveUniTok)
584
9,344
1,752
847.3
4.6
16.3
0.1063
0.0461
0.0728
6.61
0.1059
0.3816
91.0
Table 2: Unified vs. separate tokenization on NAVSIM. Scalars counts latent values per clip; Len. is the DriveUniWAM sequence length at K=1,F=2 . Costs are in TFLOPs; DiT cost is per denoising step. Lower reconstruction and prediction errors and higher PDMS are better.
Method
Reference
Sensors
NC ↑
DAC ↑
EP ↑
TTC ↑
Comfort ↑
PDMS ↑
Reference
Human Agent
–
–
100.0
100.0
87.5
100.0
99.9
94.8
Vision-Based End-to-End Methods
UniAD ( Hu et al., 2023 )
CVPR’23
6 × C
97.8
91.9
78.8
92.9
100.0
83.4
TransFuser ( Chitta et al., 2023 )
TPAMI’23
3 × C+L
97.7
92.8
79.2
92.8
100.0
84.0
ARTEMIS ( Feng et al., 2025 )
RA-L’25
3 × C+L
98.3
95.1
81.4
94.3
100.0
87.0
Table 3: NAVSIM navtest performance. C and L denote camera and LiDAR. The best and second-best learned results, including ties, are shown in bold and underlined .
Video backbone
Tokenizer
NC ↑
DAC ↑
EP ↑
TTC ↑
PDMS ↑
Part I: Visual Tokenizer Representation Ablation
Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B ( Team Wan et al., 2025 )
Native VAE
98.1
94.7
80.9
94.5
86.5
DriveUniTok
98.4
97.0
82.9
95.4
89.0 (+2.5)
Wan2.2-TI2V-5B ( Team Wan et al., 2025 )
Native VAE
98.4
95.5
82.6
94.8
87.9
DriveUniTok
99.0
97.7
85.6
96.3
91.0 (+3.1)
Part II: Scalability across Video DiT Backbones (with DriveUniTok)
Table 4: Ablation of video backbones and latent representations on the NAVSIM navtest benchmark. Part I compares the native VAE and DriveUniTok with fixed backbones, while Part II evaluates DriveUniWAM across video DiT backbones using the same unified latent. Across both parts, best and second-best results are shown in bold and underlined ; improvements over the native VAE appear in parentheses.
Appendix figures & tables17 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Group
Term
Form
Weight
Lrgb
pixel L1
∥I^−I∥1
1.0
pixel L2
∥I^−I∥22
1.0
LPIPS
VGG feature distance ( Zhang et al., 2018 )
1.0
perceptual
ConvNeXt feature distance
0.1
perceptual
DINOv3 feature distance
1.0
Ldepth
confidence
EΩ[rκ−αlogκ] , α=0.2
1.0
Appendix
Table 5: Components of the DriveUniTok training objective. Ω denotes the set of pixels where LiDAR projects to a valid depth.
Figure 4: Qualitative tokenizer reconstructions for reconstruction group 1. From left to right, the columns show RGB ground truth, reconstructed RGB, LiDAR-projected depth ground truth, and reconstructed depth at valid LiDAR pixels.
Figure 5: Qualitative tokenizer reconstructions for reconstruction group 2. From left to right, the columns show RGB ground truth, reconstructed RGB, LiDAR-projected depth ground truth, and reconstructed depth at valid LiDAR pixels.
Figure 6: Qualitative tokenizer reconstructions for reconstruction group 3. From left to right, the columns show RGB ground truth, reconstructed RGB, LiDAR-projected depth ground truth, and reconstructed depth at valid LiDAR pixels.
RGB
Depth
Ego
Variant
LPIPS DINO↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
rFVD VJ↓
AbsRel ↓
RMSE ↓
ADE ↓
FDE ↓
w/o masked reconstruction and semantic supervision
0.1540
24.55
0.68
8.40
0.0695
9.30
0.1450
0.2670
w/o intra-modal masking
0.1215
25.20
0.72
4.85
0.0520
8.00
0.0900
0.1650
w/o cross-modal masking
0.1298
25.02
0.72
5.60
0.0565
8.30
0.1040
0.1910
w/o semantic supervision
0.1195
25.55
0.74
4.28
0.0480
7.72
0.0775
0.1420
Full training objective
0.1063
25.62
0.74
3.45
0.0461
7.57
0.0728
0.1329
Appendix
Table 6: Training-objective ablation on NAVSIM navtest. Each row removes the named objectives from the full recipe. All variants share the architecture, 584×16 latent, and complete camera, depth, and ego inputs at evaluation. Best values, including ties, are bold.
Method
Reference
NC ↑
DAC ↑
DDC ↑
TLC ↑
EP ↑
TTC ↑
LK ↑
HC ↑
EC ↑
EPDMS ↑
Reference
Human Agent
–
100.0
100.0
99.8
100.0
87.4
100.0
100.0
98.1
90.1
94.5
Vision-Based End-to-End Methods
TransFuser ( Chitta et al., 2023 )
TPAMI’23
96.90
89.90
97.80
99.70
87.10
95.40
92.70
98.30
87.20
76.7
DriveSuprim ( Yao et al., 2026 )
AAAI’26
97.50
96.50
99.40
99.60
88.40
96.60
95.50
98.30
77.00
83.1
DiffusionDrive ( Liao et al., 2025a )
CVPR’25
98.20
95.90
99.40
99.80
87.50
97.30
96.80
98.30
87.70
84.5
Appendix
Table 7: Performance on the NAVSIM-v2 navtest benchmark. Human Agent is included as a reference. DriveUniWAM (Ours) denotes the imitation-trained DriveUniWAM with a frozen DriveUniTok tokenizer. TLC denotes traffic-light compliance, HC denotes history comfort, EC denotes extended comfort, and EPDMS is the NAVSIM-v2 aggregate score. The best and second-best learned results, including ties, are shown in bold and underlined .
Tokenizer Reconstruction
Joint Future Generation
Input
Output
LPIPS DINO↓
rFVD VJ↓
Depth AbsRel ↓
Ego ADE ↓
LPIPS DINO↓
gFVD VJ↓
Depth AbsRel ↓
Traj. ADE ↓
C
C+L+T
0.1671
8.8645
0.1274
1.0512
0.1170
12.1153
0.2185
3.1991
L
L+T
–
–
0.1202
0.3350
–
–
0.2934
4.5854
T
T
–
–
–
0.2978
–
–
–
2.3534
C+L
C+L+T
0.1070
3.6430
0.0463
0.0876
0.0985
8.8587
0.1669
2.6611
C+L+T
C+L+T
0.1063
3.4546
0.0461
0.0728
0.0955
6.6076
0.1059
0.3816
Appendix
Table 8: Modality sensitivity for reconstruction and joint future generation on NAVSIM navtest. C, L, and T denote camera, LiDAR/depth, and ego-trajectory modalities. Input and reconstruction Output follow the original tokenizer masking setup; the DriveUniWAM block evaluates future generation under the same input condition. Best results are highlighted in bold .
Figure 7: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 1. From left to right, the columns show the front-view observation, AutoVLA, ReCogDrive, PWM, DriveUniWAM (Ours), and DriveUniWAM with reinforcement learning post-training. AutoVLA and ReCogDrive are vision-language-action methods, whereas PWM is a world-action baseline.
Figure 8: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 2. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 9: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 3. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 10: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 4. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 11: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 5. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 12: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 6. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 13: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 7. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 14: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 8. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 15: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 9. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Figure 16: Qualitative NAVSIM navtest visualizations for scene group 10. The columns follow the ordering defined in Fig. 7 .
Recently, world-action models (WAM) have emerged to bridge vision-language-action (VLA) models and world models, unifying their reasoning and instruction-following capabilities and spatio-temporal world modeling. However, existing WAM approaches often focus on modeling 2D appearance or latent representations, with limited geometric grounding-an essential element for embodied systems operating in the physical world. We present DriveDreamer-Policy, a unified driving world-action model that integrates depth generation, future video generation, and motion planning within a single modular architecture. The model employs a large language model to process language instructions, multi-view images, and actions, followed by three lightweight generators that produce depth, future video, and actions. By learning a geometry-aware world representation and using it to guide both future prediction and planning within a unified framework, the proposed model produces more coherent imagined futures and more informed driving actions, while maintaining modularity and controllable latency. Experiments on the Navsim v1 and v2 benchmarks demonstrate that DriveDreamer-Policy achieves strong performance on both closed-loop planning and world generation tasks. In particular, our model reaches 89.2 PDMS on Navsim v1 and 88.7 EPDMS on Navsim v2, outperforming existing world-model-based approaches while producing higher-quality future video and depth predictions. Ablation studies further show that explicit depth learning provides complementary benefits to video imagination and improves planning robustness.
Autonomous driving requires reasoning about how ego actions shape future world evolution, rather than merely mapping observations to actions. However, most end-to-end methods rely on direct state-to-action imitation, while existing world models often remain weakly aligned with downstream policy generation. We introduce Discrete-WAM, a unified discrete vision-action world-policy framework that represents visual observations, future states, high-level decisions, and ego actions within a shared token space. Built on this discrete alignment, Discrete-WAM jointly trains world modeling, world-policy modeling, and policy modeling through multi-task and multi-stage pretraining, allowing action-conditioned future prediction to directly support policy generation. For downstream planning, Discrete-WAM further decomposes policy generation into hierarchical decision prediction and parallel action-token editing, where the decision token provides a high-level planning skeleton and confidence-based scheduling refines dense future actions efficiently. Experiments on large-scale autonomous-driving benchmarks show that Discrete-WAM achieves strong planning performance while supporting controllable future generation, counterfactual evaluation, surprise-based world-model analysis, and efficient parallel policy decoding. These results suggest that discrete representation alignment, unified world-policy training, and hierarchical token editing provide a promising design paradigm for physical AI.
We introduce Latent-WAM, an efficient end-to-end autonomous driving framework that achieves strong trajectory planning through spatially-aware and dynamics-informed latent world representations. Existing world-model-based planners suffer from inadequately compressed representations, limited spatial understanding, and underutilized temporal dynamics, resulting in sub-optimal planning under constrained data and compute budgets. Latent-WAM addresses these limitations with two core modules: a Spatial-Aware Compressive World Encoder (SCWE) that distills geometric knowledge from a foundation model and compresses multi-view images into compact scene tokens via learnable queries, and a Dynamic Latent World Model (DLWM) that employs a causal Transformer to autoregressively predict future world status conditioned on historical visual and ego status representations. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM v2 and HUGSIM demonstrate new state-of-the-art results: 89.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 and 28.9 HD-Score on HUGSIM, surpassing the best prior perception-free method by 3.2 EPDMS with significantly less training data and a compact 104M-parameter model. The code and model weights have been open-sourced at https://github.com/yukki555/Latent-WAM.
Linbo Wang, Yupeng Zheng, Qiang Chen +13
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Chongqing Chang’an Technology Co., Ltd · Zhongguancun Academy +2