Autonomous driving requires long-horizon closedloop decision making in dynamic traffic environments. Latent world models offer an effective framework for this problem by enabling imagination-based decision making in compact latent spaces.
arXiv:2607. 11964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving requires long-horizon closedloop decision making in dynamic traffic environments.
arXiv:2609.36851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving policies are commonly trained via imitation learning on logged demonstrations without observing the consequences of their...
arXiv:2608. 10386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sample-efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is often limited by the trade-off between data efficiency and model bias.
arXiv:2603. 28963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation with realistic traffic agents is essential for validating autonomous driving systems.
Drive‑HWM introduces a hierarchical slow‑fast world modeling framework for autonomous driving. The slow model predicts multi‑step future representations, while the fast model jointly predicts the next frame and immediate action using a lightweight multimodal backbone and an autoregressive expert. Dynamic‑Aware Latents, learned through optical‑flow prediction, explicitly capture motion dynamics, and experiments on NAVSIM v1 and v2 show strong driving performance with validated ablation studies.
PhysWAM is a unified world-action model for autonomous driving that jointly denoises multiview video, metric depth, and ego motion using a flow‑matching transformer. It introduces Coupled Point Projection (CPP), a geometric constraint that aligns generated depth points with LiDAR data after applying the predicted SE(3) ego motion, thereby enforcing physical consistency. At inference, trajectory selection uses a simple label‑free consensus rule, and the model demonstrates strong planning performance, zero‑shot transfer to unseen environments, and accurate, temporally coherent depth and video predictions.
As autonomous vehicle capabilities advance, the safe evaluation of driving policies in long-tail scenarios remains a critical bottleneck. In closed-loop simulation, the driving policy model actively interacts with the environment, where its actions dynamically update the simulator state and directly influence the next set of generated sensor observations.
WALT introduces a method to align latent trajectories with pretrained driving world models, creating a compact generative trajectory space that preserves action-relevant semantics without altering the original model. The approach uses a dual-branch autoencoder to map raw waypoints into this latent space and transfers visual world knowledge into trajectory representations. Experiments on NAVSIM benchmarks show modest performance gains and a 30.5% reduction in planner FLOPs, indicating that maintaining world representations while extracting action-relevant information can improve trajectory planning efficiency.
arXiv:2606. 06014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models (LWMs) have strengthened end-to-end autonomous driving by forecasting compact scene dynamics for downstream planning.
arXiv:2606. 03159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous vehicle capabilities advance, the safe evaluation of driving policies in long-tail scenarios remains a critical bottleneck.
The paper presents a single pretrained diffusion traffic model that serves both as an ego motion planner and as a controllable generator of safety‑critical scenarios for autonomous driving. It introduces a Single‑Stream Dual‑Stream diffusion‑transformer decoder (SSDS) that fuses scene context via joint attention, improving closed‑loop performance on the nuPlan benchmark, and a training‑free guidance scheme called Decoupled Annealing Posterior Sampling with Energy (DAPSE) that injects arbitrary energy functions at inference time. Using the same model, the authors generate realistic long‑tail driving interactions—such as aggressive cut‑ins and lead‑vehicle braking—through inference‑time guidance, exposing failure modes in black‑box planners that standard benchmarks miss.
arXiv:2607. 19719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models improve sample efficiency in continuous control by optimizing policies over imagined latent trajectories, but common neural transitions offer limited direct control over modal persistence and error accumulation in long rollouts.