World Models for Autonomous Driving

Overview

World models learn to predict future driving scenes and agent behavior, often conditioned on the vehicle’s possible actions, so a driving system can anticipate outcomes before acting. Approaches range from video-generation models to compact latent or BEV representations, occupancy and 3D geometry forecasts, and vector-based traffic simulators; planners use these predictions directly or train through simulated rollouts. Work is evaluated on datasets and benchmarks such as nuScenes, NAVSIM, Bench2Drive, and CARLA, with increasing attention to closed-loop safety and interaction rather than prediction quality alone. A central challenge is making long-horizon predictions both visually or geometrically realistic and faithful to actions, while keeping rollouts stable, safe, and efficient.

Latest papers

CardsList

143 papers23 papers in the last four weeks, up 44% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. World Action Critic (WAC) Model: Joint Foresight and Criticism for Policy Learning

    Oct 16, 2026Xiangteng Zhang, Haoyuan Liu, Yang Guan +7Action-Conditioned World ModelsWorld Models for Autonomous Driving

  2. GeoState: Learning View-Decoupled Geometry States for 3D World Modeling

    Oct 15, 2026Hongchang Liu, Jian Liu, Yujuan Ding +5World Model Learning3D Scene Prediction

  3. SafeDriveVLA: Navigation-Conditioned World Model Dreaming for Conflict-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Oct 14, 2026Shaoyuan Xie, Zihan Zhang, Jingxuan Wang +6Autonomous DrivingEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

  4. FlowSim: Rendering-Free Closed-Loop Simulation for Evaluating End-to-End Driving Systems

    Oct 13, 2026Hanfeng Wu, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro, Michael Schmidt +1Autonomous Driving SimulationEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

  5. DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving

    Oct 13, 2026Shuzheng Wang, Haoxuan Li, Shengzhen Li +5Mixture-of-TransformersAutonomous Driving Planning

  6. OccWAM: Occupancy World-Action Models with Joint Scene-to-Ego Flow Matching

    Oct 13, 2026Qihang Huang, Wenhui Huang, Collister Chua +6World Action ModelsWorld Models for Autonomous Driving

  7. MORE: Learning Motion-Oriented Registers for Driving World Models and Planning

    Oct 10, 2026Yingdong Gu, Haoyu Wang, Shaocheng Yan +9World Models for Autonomous DrivingVideo Representation Learning

  8. InfraWorld: Motion-Aware World Modeling for Roadside 4D Occupancy Forecasting

    Oct 10, 2026Songkai Wang, Xiaokai Bai, Lei Yang +1Spatiotemporal Forecasting3D Occupancy Prediction

  9. SimVTA: Simulation-Grounded Video-Trajectory Alignment for Driving World Action Models

    Oct 9, 2026Changhui Jing, Haochen Tian, Hongchen Li +8World Models for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

  10. VGGTWorld-VLA: Intent-Conditioned 3D World Evolution for Autonomous Driving

    Oct 8, 2026Zhaoyang Liu, Kun Jiang, Ziying Song +13D Scene PredictionAction-Conditioned World Models

  11. AffordDrive3D: Affordance-Aware World-Action Modeling with Spatial Understanding

    Oct 8, 2026Tianhui Cai, Xinglong Sun, Chao Fang +6Autonomous DrivingWorld Models for Autonomous Driving

  12. GeoWM: Efficient Direct World Modeling in Explicit Geometry

    Oct 5, 2026Mehrdad Noori, Guile Wu, Sam Hosseini +1World Model LearningWorld Models for Robotics

  13. Artemis: Geometry-Grounded Multi-Agent Driving World Models with Shared 3D State and Progressive Memory Update

    Oct 4, 2026Sitian Shen, Jiuming Liu, Mengmeng Liu +7World Models for Autonomous DrivingVideo World Models

  14. ReWAM: Reciprocal World Action Models for Interactive Autonomous Driving

    Sep 30, 2026Benshan Ma, Pei Liu, Ruiguo Zhong +4Action-Conditioned World ModelsMulti-Agent Systems

  15. PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving

    Sep 29, 2026Dhruv Parikh, Fengcheng Yu, Quankai Gao +11Metric Depth EstimationAutonomous Driving

  16. V2X-WAM: A Cooperative World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Sep 29, 2026Junwei You, Weizhe Tang, Can Wang +6End-to-End Autonomous DrivingAction-Conditioned World Models

  17. RoXDrive: Closed-Loop Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Action-Faithful Rollouts

    Sep 29, 2026Hongbin Lin, Chaoda Zheng, Yiming Yang +11End-to-End Autonomous DrivingAction-Conditioned World Models

  18. World4Scorer: Outcome-Grounded World Modeling for Autonomous Driving

    Sep 29, 2026Jieyuan Pei, Meiyi Lu, Sining Ang +12World Model-Based PlanningWorld Models for Autonomous Driving

  19. MomWorld: Momentum-Aware Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Autonomous Driving

    Sep 27, 2026Ziying Song, Shengkai Zhang, Lei Yang +6Flow MatchingWorld Model-Based Planning

  20. What Do Latent Predictive Vehicle Representations Retain? Measuring State, Geometry, and Local Response

    Sep 26, 2026Enzo Nicolás Spotorno, Josafat Leal Filho, Antônio Augusto FröhlichLatent Dynamics ModelingState Representation Learning

  21. TriO: Tri-Modal Unsupervised Occupancy World Model for Anything Perception

    Sep 25, 2026Quinlan Sykora, Sourav Biswas, Christopher Diehl +3Unsupervised LearningAutonomous Driving Perception

  22. WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving

    Sep 24, 2026Mingkai Jia, Jiaxin Guo, Zhijian Shu +5World Model-Based PlanningAutonomous Driving Planning