World Models for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving requires reasoning about how the environment evolves and planning actions accordingly. Existing world-model-based approaches typically predict future scenes first and plan afterwards, resulting in open-loop imagination that may drift from the actual decision process. In this paper, we present Uni-World VLA, a unified vision-language-action (VLA) model that tightly interleaves future frame prediction and trajectory planning. Instead of generating a full world rollout before planning, our model alternates between predicting future frames and ego actions step by step, allowing planning decisions to be continuously conditioned on the imagined future observations. This interleaved generation forms a closed-loop interaction between world modeling and control, enabling more adaptive decision-making in dynamic traffic scenarios. In addition, we incorporate monocular depth information into frames to provide stronger geometric cues for world modeling, improving long-horizon scene prediction. Experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark show that our approach achieves competitive closed-loop planning performance while producing high-fidelity future frame predictions. These results demonstrate that tightly coupling world prediction and planning is a promising direction for scalable VLA driving systems.

Vision-language-action models have reshaped autonomous driving to incorporate languages into the decision-making process. However, most existing pipelines only utilize the language modality for scene descriptions or reasoning and lack the flexibility to follow diverse user instructions for personalized driving. To address this, we first construct a large-scale driving dataset (InstructScene) containing around 100,000 scenes annotated with diverse driving instructions with the corresponding trajectories. We then propose a unified Vision-Language-World-Action model, Vega, for instruction-based generation and planning. We employ the autoregressive paradigm to process visual inputs (vision) and language instructions (language) and the diffusion paradigm to generate future predictions (world modeling) and trajectories (action). We perform joint attention to enable interactions between the modalities and use individual projection layers for different modalities for more capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves superior planning performance but also exhibits strong instruction-following abilities, paving the way for more intelligent and personalized driving systems.

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.

Video generation models have shown strong potential as world models for autonomous driving simulation. However, existing approaches are primarily trained on real-world driving datasets, which mostly contain natural and safe driving scenarios. As a result, current models often fail when conditioned on challenging or counterfactual trajectories-such as imperfect trajectories generated by simulators or planning systems-producing videos with severe physical inconsistencies and artifacts. To address this limitation, we propose PhyGenesis, a world model designed to generate driving videos with high visual fidelity and strong physical consistency. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) a physical condition generator that transforms potentially invalid trajectory inputs into physically plausible conditions, and (2) a physics-enhanced video generator that produces high-fidelity multi-view driving videos under these conditions. To effectively train these components, we construct a large-scale, physics-rich heterogeneous dataset. Specifically, in addition to real-world driving videos, we generate diverse challenging driving scenarios using the CARLA simulator, from which we derive supervision signals that guide the model to learn physically grounded dynamics under extreme conditions. This challenging-trajectory learning strategy enables trajectory correction and promotes physically consistent video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhyGenesis consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially on challenging trajectories. Our project page is available at: https://wm-research.github.io/PhyGenesis/.

Generating safety-critical driving scenarios requires understanding why dangerous interactions arise, rather than merely forcing collisions. However, existing methods rely on heuristic adversarial agent selection and unstructured perturbations, lacking explicit modeling of interaction dependencies and thus exhibiting a realism--adversarial trade-off. We present CounterScene, a framework that endows closed-loop generative BEV world models with structured counterfactual reasoning for safety-critical scenario generation. Given a safe scene, CounterScene asks: what if the causally critical agent had behaved differently? To answer this, we introduce causal adversarial agent identification to identify the critical agent and classify conflict types, and develop a conflict-aware interactive world model in which a causal interaction graph is used to explicitly model dynamic inter-agent dependencies. Building on this structure, stage-adaptive counterfactual guidance performs minimal interventions on the identified agent, removing its spatial and temporal safety margins while allowing risk to emerge through natural interaction propagation. Extensive experiments on nuScenes demonstrate that CounterScene achieves the strongest adversarial effectiveness while maintaining superior trajectory realism across all horizons, improving long-horizon collision rate from 12.3% to 22.7% over the strongest baseline with better realism (ADE 1.88 vs.2.09). Notably, this advantage further widens over longer rollouts, and CounterScene generalizes zero-shot to nuPlan with state-of-the-art realism.

Scalable and reliable evaluation is increasingly critical in the end-to-end era of autonomous driving, where vision--language--action (VLA) policies directly map raw sensor streams to driving actions. Yet, current evaluation pipelines still rely heavily on real-world road testing, which is costly, biased toward limited scenario coverage, and difficult to reproduce. These challenges motivate a real-world simulator that can generate realistic future observations under proposed actions, while remaining controllable and stable over long horizons. We present X-World, an action-conditioned multi-camera generative world model that simulates future observations directly in video space. Given synchronized multi-view camera history and a future action sequence, X-World generates future multi-camera video streams that follow the commanded actions. To ensure reproducible and editable scene rollouts, X-World further supports optional controls over dynamic traffic agents and static road elements, and retains a text-prompt interface for appearance-level control (e.g., weather and time of day). Beyond world simulation, X-World also enables video style transfer by conditioning on appearance prompts while preserving the underlying action and scene dynamics. At the core of X-World is a multi-view latent video generator designed to explicitly encourage cross-view geometric consistency and temporal coherence under diverse control signals. Experiments show that X-World achieves high-quality multi-view video generation with (i) strong view consistency across cameras, (ii) stable temporal dynamics over long rollouts, and (iii) high controllability with strict action following and faithful adherence to optional scene controls. These properties make X-World a practical foundation for scalable and reproducible evaluation.

Recently, world models have been incorporated into the autonomous driving systems to improve the planning reliability. Existing approaches typically predict future states through appearance generation or deterministic regression, which limits their ability to capture trajectory-conditioned scene evolution and leads to unreliable action planning. To address this, we propose DynFlowDrive, a latent world model that leverages flow-based dynamics to model the transition of world states under different driving actions. By adopting the rectifiedflow formulation, the model learns a velocity field that describes how the scene state changes under different driving actions, enabling progressive prediction of future latent states. Building upon this, we further introduce a stability-aware multi-mode trajectory selection strategy that evaluates candidate trajectories according to the stability of the induced scene transitions. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and NavSim benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse driving frameworks without introducing additional inference overhead. Source code will be abaliable at https://github.com/xiaolul2/DynFlowDrive.

Closed-loop evaluation of autonomous-driving policies requires interactive simulation beyond log replay. However, existing generative world models often degrade in closed loop due to (i) history-free initialization that mismatches policy inputs, (ii) multi-step sampling latency that violates real-time budgets, and (iii) compounding kinematic infeasibility over long horizons. We propose VectorWorld, a streaming world model that incrementally generates ego-centric $64 \mathrm{m}\times 64\mathrm{m}$ lane--agent vector-graph tiles during rollout. VectorWorld aligns initialization with history-conditioned policies by producing a policy-compatible interaction state via a motion-aware gated VAE. It enables real-time outpainting via solver-free one-step masked completion with an edge-gated relational DiT trained with interval-conditioned MeanFlow and JVP-based large-step supervision. To stabilize long-horizon rollouts, we introduce $Δ$Sim, a physics-aligned non-ego (NPC) policy with hybrid discrete--continuous actions and differentiable kinematic logit shaping. On Waymo open motion and nuPlan, VectorWorld improves map-structure fidelity and initialization validity, and supports stable, real-time $1\mathrm{km}+$ closed-loop rollouts (code).

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to generate safe and plausible planning policies from raw sensor input. Driving world models have shown great potential in learning rich representations by predicting the future evolution of a driving scene. However, existing driving world models primarily focus on visual scene representation, and motion representation is not explicitly designed to be planner-shared and inheritable, leaving a schism between the optimization of visual scene generation and the requirements of precise motion planning. We present WorldDrive, a holistic framework that couples scene generation and real-time planning via unifying vision and motion representation. We first introduce a Trajectory-aware Driving World Model, which conditions on a trajectory vocabulary to enforce consistency between visual dynamics and motion intentions, enabling the generation of diverse and plausible future scenes conditioned on a specific trajectory. We transfer the vision and motion encoders to a downstream Multi-modal Planner, ensuring the driving policy operates on mature representations pre-optimized by scene generation. A simple interaction between motion representation, visual representation, and ego status can generate high-quality, multi-modal trajectories. Furthermore, to exploit the world model's foresight, we propose a Future-aware Rewarder, which distills future latent representation from the frozen world model to evaluate and select optimal trajectories in real-time. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM, NAVSIM-v2, and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that WorldDrive achieves leading planning performance among vision-only methods while maintaining high-fidelity action-controlled video generation capabilities, providing strong evidence for the effectiveness of unifying vision and motion representation for robust autonomous driving.

End-to-end autonomous driving policies based on Imitation Learning (IL) often struggle in closed-loop execution due to the misalignment between inadequate open-loop training objectives and real driving requirements. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a solution by directly optimizing driving goals via reward signals, the rendering-based training environments introduce the rendering gap and are inefficient due to high computational costs. To overcome these challenges, we present a novel Pseudo-simulation-based RL method for closed-loop end-to-end autonomous driving, PerlAD. Based on offline datasets, PerlAD constructs a pseudo-simulation that operates in vector space, enabling efficient, rendering-free trial-and-error training. To bridge the gap between static datasets and dynamic closed-loop environments, PerlAD introduces a prediction world model that generates reactive agent trajectories conditioned on the ego vehicle's plan. Furthermore, to facilitate efficient planning, PerlAD utilizes a hierarchical decoupled planner that combines IL for lateral path generation and RL for longitudinal speed optimization. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that PerlAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Bench2Drive benchmark, surpassing the previous E2E RL method by 10.29% in Driving Score without requiring expensive online interactions. Additional evaluations on the DOS benchmark further confirm its reliability in handling safety-critical occlusion scenarios.

Autonomous driving systems depend on on models that can reason about high-level scene contexts and accurately predict the dynamics of their surrounding environment. Vision- Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for decision-making and scene understanding, offering strong capabilities in contextual reasoning. However, their limited spatial comprehension constrains their effectiveness as end-to-end driving models. World Models (WM) internalize environmental dynamics to predict future scene evolution. Recently explored as ego-motion predictors and foundation models for autonomous driving, they represent a promising direction for addressing key challenges in the field, particularly enhancing generalization while maintaining dynamic prediction. To leverage the complementary strengths of context-based decision making and prediction, we propose WorldVLM: A hybrid architecture that unifies VLMs and WMs. In our design, the high-level VLM generates behavior commands to guide the driving WM, enabling interpretable and context-aware actions. We evaluate conditioning strategies and provide insights into the hybrid design challenges.

We propose DynVLA, a driving VLA model that introduces a new CoT paradigm termed Dynamics CoT. DynVLA forecasts compact world dynamics before action generation, enabling more informed and physically grounded decision-making. To obtain compact dynamics representations, DynVLA introduces a Dynamics Tokenizer that compresses future evolution into a small set of dynamics tokens. Considering the rich environment dynamics in interaction-intensive driving scenarios, DynVLA decouples ego-centric and environment-centric dynamics, yielding more accurate world dynamics modeling. We then train DynVLA to generate dynamics tokens before actions through SFT and RFT, improving decision quality while maintaining latency-efficient inference. Compared to Textual CoT, which lacks fine-grained spatiotemporal understanding, and Visual CoT, which introduces substantial redundancy due to dense image prediction, Dynamics CoT captures the evolution of the world in a compact, interpretable, and efficient form. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM, Bench2Drive, and a large-scale in-house dataset demonstrate that DynVLA consistently outperforms Textual CoT and Visual CoT methods, validating the effectiveness and practical value of Dynamics CoT. Project Page: https://yaoyao-jpg.github.io/dynvla.

Emerging generative world models and vision-language-action (VLA) systems are rapidly reshaping automated driving by enabling scalable simulation, long-horizon forecasting, and capability-rich decision making. Across these directions, latent representations serve as the central computational substrate: they compress high-dimensional multi-sensor observations, enable temporally coherent rollouts, and provide interfaces for planning, reasoning, and controllable generation. This paper proposes a unifying latent-space framework that synthesizes recent progress in world models for automated driving. The framework organizes the design space by the target and form of latent representations (latent worlds, latent actions, latent generators; continuous states, discrete tokens, and hybrids) and by structural priors for geometry, topology, and semantics. Building on this taxonomy, the paper articulates five cross-cutting internal mechanics (i.e, structural isomorphism, long-horizon temporal stability, semantic and reasoning alignment, value-aligned objectives and post-training, as well as adaptive computation and deliberation) and connects these design choices to robustness, generalization, and deployability. The work also proposes concrete evaluation prescriptions, including a closed-loop metric suite and a resource-aware deliberation cost, designed to reduce the open-loop / closed-loop mismatch. Finally, the paper identifies actionable research directions toward advancing latent world model for decision-ready, verifiable, and resource-efficient automated driving.

Data-efficient learning remains a central challenge in autonomous driving due to the high cost and safety risks of large-scale real-world interaction. Although world-model-based reinforcement learning enables policy optimization through latent imagination, existing approaches often lack explicit mechanisms to encode spatial and kinematic structure essential for driving tasks. In this work, we build upon the Recurrent State-Space Model (RSSM) and propose a kinematics-aware latent world model framework for autonomous driving. Vehicle kinematic information is incorporated into the observation encoder to ground latent transitions in physically meaningful motion dynamics, while geometry-aware supervision regularizes the RSSM latent state to capture task-relevant spatial structure beyond pixel reconstruction. The resulting structured latent dynamics improve long-horizon imagination fidelity and stabilize policy optimization. Experiments in a driving simulation benchmark demonstrate consistent gains over both model-free and pixel-based world-model baselines in terms of sample efficiency and driving performance. Ablation studies further verify that the proposed design enhances spatial representation quality within the latent space. These results suggest that integrating kinematic grounding into RSSM-based world models provides a scalable and physically grounded paradigm for autonomous driving policy learning.

With advances in imitation learning (IL) and large-scale driving datasets, end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has made great progress recently. Currently, IL-based methods have become a mainstream paradigm: models rely on standard driving behaviors given by experts, and learn to minimize the discrepancy between their actions and expert actions. However, this objective of "only driving like the expert" suffers from limited generalization: when encountering rare or unseen long-tail scenarios outside the distribution of expert demonstrations, models tend to produce unsafe decisions in the absence of prior experience. This raises a fundamental question: Can an E2E-AD system make reliable decisions without any expert action supervision? Motivated by this, we propose a unified framework named Risk-aware World Model Predictive Control (RaWMPC) to address this generalization dilemma through robust control, without reliance on expert demonstrations. Practically, RaWMPC leverages a world model to predict the consequences of multiple candidate actions and selects low-risk actions through explicit risk evaluation. To endow the world model with the ability to predict the outcomes of risky driving behaviors, we design a risk-aware interaction strategy that systematically exposes the world model to hazardous behaviors, making catastrophic outcomes predictable and thus avoidable. Furthermore, to generate low-risk candidate actions at test time, we introduce a self-evaluation distillation method to distill riskavoidance capabilities from the well-trained world model into a generative action proposal network without any expert demonstration. Extensive experiments show that RaWMPC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios, while providing superior decision interpretability.

World foundation models aim to simulate the evolution of the real world with physically plausible behavior. Unlike prior methods that handle spatial and temporal correlations separately, we propose RAYNOVA, a geometry-agonistic multiview world model for driving scenarios that employs a dual-causal autoregressive framework. It follows both scale-wise and temporal topological orders in the autoregressive process, and leverages global attention for unified 4D spatio-temporal reasoning. Different from existing works that impose strong 3D geometric priors, RAYNOVA constructs an isotropic spatio-temporal representation across views, frames, and scales based on relative Plücker-ray positional encoding, enabling robust generalization to diverse camera setups and ego motions. We further introduce a recurrent training paradigm to alleviate distribution drift in long-horizon video generation. RAYNOVA achieves state-of-the-art multi-view video generation results on nuScenes, while offering higher throughput and strong controllability under diverse input conditions, generalizing to novel views and camera configurations without explicit 3D scene representation. Our code will be released at https://raynova-ai.github.io/.

The end-to-end (E2E) paradigm, which maps sensor inputs directly to driving decisions, has recently attracted significant attention due to its unified modeling capability and scalability. However, ensuring safety in this unified framework remains one of the most critical challenges. In this work, we propose SafeDrive, an E2E planning framework designed to perform explicit and interpretable safety reasoning through a trajectory-conditioned Sparse World Model. SafeDrive comprises two complementary networks: the Sparse World Network (SWNet) and the Fine-grained Reasoning Network (FRNet). SWNet constructs trajectory-conditioned sparse worlds that simulate the future behaviors of critical dynamic agents and road entities, providing interaction-centric representations for downstream reasoning. FRNet then evaluates agent-specific collision risks and temporal adherence to drivable regions, enabling precise identification of safety-critical events across future timesteps. SafeDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks. On NAVSIM, it records a PDMS of 91.6 and an EPDMS of 87.5, with only 61 collisions out of 12,146 scenarios (0.5%). On Bench2Drive, SafeDrive attains a 66.8% driving score.

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.

Generative world models for autonomous driving (AD) are of great value in applications such as data augmentation, closed-loop simulation, and safety-critical scenario evaluation. Unlike the widely studied image modality, in this work we explore generative world models for LiDAR data. Existing generation methods for LiDAR predominantly focus on single frame generation or lack the capacity for interactive simulation, while existing prediction approaches require multiple frames of historical input and can only deterministically predict multiple frames at once. Both paradigms fail to support long-horizon interactive generation. To this end, we introduce LaGen, which, to the best of our knowledge is the first autoregressive framework capable of generating long-horizon LiDAR scenes in a frame-by-frame, interactive manner. LaGen is able to take a single-frame input as a starting point and effectively utilize bounding box information as conditions to generate high-fidelity 4D scene. In addition, we introduce a scene decoupling estimation module to enhance the model's interactive generation capability for object-level content, as well as a noise modulation module to mitigate error accumulation during long-horizon generation. We extensively evaluate LaGen's performance in controlled data generation and long-horizon scene generation on the nuScenes dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that LaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially on later frames. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/szzhou88/LaGen.

Autonomous driving world models are expected to work effectively across three core dimensions: state, action, and reward. However, existing methods are typically restricted to fragmented modality modeling, short-horizon drift, and imprecise action control, while lacking intrinsic mechanisms for policy evaluation. In this paper, we introduce OmniNWM, an Omniscient panoramic Navigation World Model that addresses all three dimensions within a consistent probabilistic framework. For State, OmniNWM generates panoramic videos of RGB, semantics, metric depth, and 3D occupancy, ensuring pixel-level alignment across modalities with joint distribution modeling. To mitigate autoregressive exposure bias, we propose a structured panoramic forcing strategy to stabilize long-horizon generation via stochastic manifold thickening. For Action, we introduce canonical geometric action encoding with normalized panoramic Plücker ray-maps. This representation decouples motion dynamics from sensor intrinsics, enabling precise, zero-shot trajectory control across heterogeneous datasets and camera configurations. For Reward, we derive intrinsic occupancy-grounded dense rewards directly from generated 3D volumes, establishing a reliable closed-loop simulation cycle for evaluating diverse planning agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniNWM achieves SOTA performance in generation fidelity and control precision, with remarkable zero-shot robustness to novel scenes on NuPlan and in-house datasets with distinct camera rigs. Project page is available at https://arlo0o.github.io/OmniNWM/.

Occupancy World Models (OWMs) aim to predict future 3D occupancy scenes from historical observations and future ego motions, providing a useful world simulation tool for autonomous driving. Existing methods usually rely on large networks to implicitly align multi-frame historical states and predict future occupancy in a full-state manner, which is costly and redundant because most scene regions remain unchanged over short time intervals. In this paper, we propose Aligned Delta-Triplane Transformer (ADTT), a compact 4D OWM that explicitly aligns historical triplanes with ego-motion compensation and predicts only future scene changes. Based on the aligned triplane prior, a query-conditioned Transformer predicts residual changes, where ego-motion queries guide controllable future motion and learnable external queries capture scene changes beyond ego motion. The predicted changes are added to the aligned prior and decoded into future occupancy scenes. Experiments on Occ3D-nus show that ADTT achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance with fewer parameters and higher FPS. Our code is publicly available online: https://github.com/kyoran/ADTT.

Front-view driving video continuation is a critical component for constructing sophisticated world models. However, maintaining long-term coherence faces the fundamental challenge of mitigating ''generative degeneration'' during the auto-regressive process. This phenomenon arises when the limited attention capacity of world models becomes saturated with high-entropy pixel details over extended sequences, leading to a collapse of global scene structure and motion intensity. To address this, we introduce STRIDE (STructural RegIsters for Decoupled Extrapolation), a large vision model architecture with an enforced semantic foresight mechanism. STRIDE decouples video continuation into two sub-tasks via interleaved generation of semantic and RGB tokens: forecasting low-entropy semantic maps, and subsequently generating high-frequency visual appearance conditioned on this structure. The semantic tokens explicitly function as ''structural registers'' -- dedicated memory slots that robustly retain the scene's long-term context and world dynamics. Furthermore, we employ an architecturally decoupled flow matching-based super-resolution module to enhance the final visual fidelity. Extensive experiments in autonomous driving scenarios demonstrate that STRIDE effectively mitigates generative degeneration, achieving minute-level, temporally consistent driving video continuation with strong generalization ability.

We propose the use of latent space generative world models to address the covariate shift problem in autonomous driving. A world model is a neural network capable of predicting an agent's next state given past states and actions. By leveraging a world model during training, the driving policy effectively mitigates covariate shift without requiring an excessive amount of training data. During end-to-end training, our policy learns how to recover from errors by aligning with states observed in human demonstrations, so that at runtime it can recover from perturbations outside the training distribution. Additionally, we introduce a novel transformer-based perception encoder that employs multi-view cross-attention and a learned scene query. We present qualitative and quantitative results, demonstrating significant improvements upon prior state of the art in closed-loop testing in the CARLA simulator, as well as showing the ability to handle perturbations in both CARLA and NVIDIA's DRIVE Sim.