mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator

arXiv 1711.03938 ↗First posted 10 Nov 2017cs.LG cs.AI cs.CVcited by 2,449

On the map: World models → World models for autonomous driving

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an end-to-end model trained via imitation learning, and an end-to-end model trained via reinforcement learning. The approaches are evaluated in controlled scenarios of increasing difficulty, and their performance is examined via metrics provided by CARLA, illustrating the platform's utility for autonomous driving research. The supplementary video can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Hp8Dz-Zek2E

Key facts. Cited by 2,449 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for autonomous driving, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 0 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2017.

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2017: 1; 2018: 3; 2019: 8; 2020: 4; 2021: 255; 2022: 321; 2023: 401; 2024: 470; 2025: 566; 2026: 420.

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  1. 2020D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,427
  2. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  3. 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulatorscited by 881
  4. 2017AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AIcited by 869
  5. 2022Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesiscited by 724
  6. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
  7. 2021KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3Dcited by 575
  8. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandboxcited by 548
  9. 2023DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answeringcited by 536
  10. 2024Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulationcited by 495
  11. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehiclescited by 493
  12. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontierscited by 490
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  1. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 485
  2. 2021Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 377
  3. 2021CLIP-NeRF: Text-and-Image Driven Manipulation of Neural Radiance Fieldscited by 370
  4. 2022ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learningcited by 368
  5. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 354
  6. 2021Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scanscited by 336
  7. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 334
  8. 2023Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classificationcited by 327
  9. 2022V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformercited by 320
  10. 2023Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 319
  11. 2023LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Modelscited by 305
  12. 2021OPV2V: An Open Benchmark Dataset and Fusion Pipeline for Perception with Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communicationcited by 304
  13. 2022Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stonecited by 304
  14. 2023UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulatorcited by 297
  15. 2022Flexible Diffusion Modeling of Long Videoscited by 294
  16. 2021MetaDrive: Composing Diverse Driving Scenarios for Generalizable Reinforcement Learningcited by 290
  17. 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 289
  18. 2023PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Trackingcited by 276
  19. 2022Where2comm: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Spatial Confidence Mapscited by 255
  20. 2024Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 252
  21. 2022Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baselinecited by 248
  22. 2021End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Plannercited by 242
  23. 2023Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planningcited by 242
  24. 2023DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Drivingcited by 233
  25. 2022A Survey on Offline Reinforcement Learning: Taxonomy, Review, and Open Problemscited by 231
  26. 2022CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformerscited by 231
  27. 2022CoBEVT: Cooperative Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation with Sparse Transformerscited by 227
  28. 2021Editing Conditional Radiance Fieldscited by 222
  29. 2024Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splattingcited by 221
  30. 2021GRAM: Generative Radiance Manifolds for 3D-Aware Image Generationcited by 216
  31. 2022Safety-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Using Interpretable Sensor Fusion Transformercited by 212
  32. 2021Trustworthy AI: From Principles to Practicescited by 207
  33. 2023A Survey on Video Diffusion Modelscited by 206
  34. 2023Scalable 3D Captioning with Pretrained Modelscited by 203
  35. 2025ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 198
  36. 2021ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrationscited by 197
  37. 2021End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coachcited by 194
  38. 2021Learning Distilled Collaboration Graph for Multi-Agent Perceptioncited by 194

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  1. 2025A Comprehensive Review of Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving in the CARLA Simulator
  2. 2024Analysis of a Modular Autonomous Driving Architecture: The Top Submission to CARLA Leaderboard 2.0 Challenge
  3. 2020Guided Policy Search Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Urban Autonomous Driving
  4. 2025Benchmarking Autonomous Driving Planners Across Leaderboards: A Unified CARLA-Based Evaluation
  5. 2023Towards Sim2Real Transfer of Autonomy Algorithms using AutoDRIVE Ecosystem
  6. 2025PlanT 2.0: Exposing Biases and Structural Flaws in Closed-Loop Driving
  7. 2026Aligning Microscopic Vehicle and Macroscopic Traffic Statistics: Reconstructing Driving Behavior from Partial Data
  8. 2022SHAIL: Safety-Aware Hierarchical Adversarial Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments