arXiv Computer Vision

Controllable Crowd Generation through World-Model Planning

The paper introduces Ctrl-CWM, a multi‑agent controllable crowd world model that merges crowd generation with run‑time control. It uses an encoder to learn human motion dynamics, an actor to propose pedestrian displacements, a critic to evaluate imagined trajectories, and a planner that selects actions based on critic scores and user‑defined costs. Experiments show that Ctrl‑CWM outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods in realism and collision metrics while allowing new control objectives to be added without retraining.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Diffusion Policies for Short-Horizon Planning in Robot Crowd Navigation

The paper introduces Planning Diffusion Policy Optimization (PDPO), an offline‑to‑online reinforcement‑learning framework that employs a diffusion policy to produce short‑horizon action chunks for robot crowd navigation. PDPO is pretrained on collision‑avoidance demonstrations and fine‑tuned online with PPO, generating five‑step action sequences applied in a receding‑horizon manner. The authors also identify a benchmark artifact where agents can leave the valid domain without explicit boundary constraints, and they mitigate this by treating boundary violations as collisions, leading to improved success rates over strong baselines.

By Wendong Li, Jochen Garcke
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

BehaviorWorldGen: Closing the Loop between Action Models and World Simulators via Controllable Behavior-Aware Structured World Generation

arXiv:2608.22187v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern driving action models are increasingly improved in a self-improvement loop, where a learned world simulator imagines future observations and t...

By Jiaqi Wang, Zhuo Zhang, Haining Guan, Tingguang Zhou, Haowen Cui, Zhongyang Zhu, Yulong Zheng, ChuanYe Wang, Xuefeng Chen, Zhen Yang, Tianchen Deng, Feiyang Tan, Hangning Zhou, Bo Dai, Lixia Shen, Xiwu Chen, Xiyang Wang, Jiajun Zhu
arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

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

SimVTA is a post‑training framework that enhances driving world action models by aligning simulated future videos with candidate trajectories. It samples trajectories, renders high‑reward futures in a real‑world simulator using 3D Gaussian Splatting, and prioritizes video supervision for high‑error futures. The approach improves planning performance, raising PDMS from 86.2 to 91.3 on NAVSIM v1 and achieving strong results on NAVSIM v2 and HUGSIM.

By Changhui Jing, Haochen Tian, Hongchen Li, Tianyu Li, Caojun Wang, Zihao Zhang, Yanhao Liu, Chengen Xie, Bailin Li, Hao Zhao, Zhenjie Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 24

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

arXiv:2608.20974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) learns powerful spatiotemporal representations from video through self-supervised latent featu...

By Xinlin Wang, Yujiao Xiang, Yuheng Zhou, Jingqi Wang, Minqing Huang, Jiajie Huang, Dongxu Wei, Tingguang Zhou, Xiyang Wang, Gong Chen, Zhi Xu, Feiyang Tan, Hangning Zhou, Mu Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

SimWAM: A Simple World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

SimWAM is a lightweight World-Action Model that uses future‑video prediction only during training to supervise an action expert, enabling end‑to‑end autonomous driving without costly test‑time future imagination. The architecture co‑trains a pretrained video expert and a lightweight action expert via joint flow matching, while an isolated attention mask keeps action prediction independent of future frames. This design allows the video backbone to be swapped and the action expert scaled independently, achieving 91.5 PDMS on NAVSIM, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art WAM planners with lower latency and zero‑shot transfer to nuScenes.

By Zongchuang Zhao, Xin Zhou, Tianyang Xu, Zhengyang Sun, Kaixuan Zhou, Yu Wu, Honglin Li, Dingkang Liang, Xiang Bai
arXiv AI
Sep 10

PV-WM: A Heterogeneous Micro-Macro World Model for Articulated Pedestrian-Vehicle Co-Rollout

PV-WM is a history‑only world model that jointly predicts pedestrian root motion, 15‑joint articulation, and vehicle kinematic states in a synchronized heterogeneous state. It uses recurrent updates to generate pedestrian and vehicle motion chunks, reconstructing vehicle boxes from predicted center, heading, and observed extent, and recomputes pedestrian‑vehicle geometry after each transition. Compared to a one‑shot predictor, PV‑WM reduces Root ADE by 12.7% and MPJPE by 14.8%, and across 824 Waymo contexts it lowers Root ADE by 5.2%, MPJPE by 7.6%, P‑V distance error by 11.9%, and oriented‑box closest‑approach error by 5.8%, while using 57.1% fewer parameters, 96.5% fewer FLOPs, and 25.5% lower p95 latency.

By Haozhuang Chi, Jingsong Liang, Ziying Song, Lei Yang, Shihao Li, Haoruo Zhang, Chen Lv
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Unified Prediction and Planning via Conflict-Aware Disjoint Parameter Training

The paper introduces Disjoint Parameter Training (DPT), a framework that addresses Skill Conflict—where shared encoder parameters hinder separate tasks of motion prediction and safety planning—by training tasks on distinct parameter subsets before merging. DPT employs sparse merging to integrate only the most influential parameters, reducing interference and enhancing representational capacity. Experiments on JRDB and JTA benchmarks show that DPT outperforms existing unified models, demonstrating its effectiveness for safe, resource‑efficient robot navigation.

By Taewon Seo, Seonae Jeon, Giwon Lee, Kuk-Jin Yoon, Daehee Park