mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MARS: An Instance-aware, Modular and Realistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2307.15058 ↗First posted 27 Jul 2023cs.CVcited by 170

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 32 in End-to-end autonomous driving, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Nowadays, autonomous cars can drive smoothly in ordinary cases, and it is widely recognized that realistic sensor simulation will play a critical role in solving remaining corner cases by simulating them. To this end, we propose an autonomous driving simulator based upon neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Compared with existing works, ours has three notable features: (1) Instance-aware. Our simulator models the foreground instances and background environments separately with independent networks so that the static (e.g., size and appearance) and dynamic (e.g., trajectory) properties of instances can be controlled separately. (2) Modular. Our simulator allows flexible switching between different modern NeRF-related backbones, sampling strategies, input modalities, etc. We expect this modular design to boost academic progress and industrial deployment of NeRF-based autonomous driving simulation. (3) Realistic. Our simulator set new state-of-the-art photo-realism results given the best module selection. Our simulator will be open-sourced while most of our counterparts are not. Project page: https://open-air-sun.github.io/mars/.

Key facts. Cited by 170 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 29 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2023.

Builds on

29 of 34 references.

References · 29

  1. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
  2. 2022Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encodingcited by 3,723
  3. 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,449
  4. 2021Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fieldscited by 2,032
  5. 2021Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fieldscited by 1,964
  6. 2022TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fieldscited by 1,280
  7. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  8. 2020GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fieldscited by 785
  9. 2023K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearancecited by 746
  10. 2021Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Freecited by 735
  11. 2023Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Developmentcited by 600
  12. 2022MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstructioncited by 470
17 more
  1. 2021In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representationcited by 415
  2. 2020Virtual KITTI 2cited by 353
  3. 2020Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenescited by 298
  4. 2022DAIR-V2X: A Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detectioncited by 273
  5. 2021Urban Radiance Fieldscited by 263
  6. 2022Panoptic Neural Fields: A Semantic Object-Aware Neural Scene Representationcited by 243
  7. 2022Panoptic NeRF: 3D-to-2D Label Transfer for Panoptic Urban Scene Segmentationcited by 152
  8. 2023SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenescited by 151
  9. 2023F2-NeRF: Fast Neural Radiance Field Training with Free Camera Trajectoriescited by 118
  10. 2023S-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Street Viewscited by 116
  11. 2023ADAPT: Action-aware Driving Caption Transformercited by 78
  12. 2021GeoSim: Realistic Video Simulation via Geometry-Aware Composition for Self-Drivingcited by 75
  13. 2019AADS: Augmented Autonomous Driving Simulation using Data-driven Algorithmscited by 39
  14. 2023STEPS: Joint Self-supervised Nighttime Image Enhancement and Depth Estimationcited by 37
  15. 2023LODE: Locally Conditioned Eikonal Implicit Scene Completion from Sparse LiDARcited by 31
  16. 2021PQ-Transformer: Jointly Parsing 3D Objects and Layouts from Point Cloudscited by 26
  17. 2022VIBUS: Data-efficient 3D Scene Parsing with VIewpoint Bottleneck and Uncertainty-Spectrum Modelingcited by 21

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 18; 2024: 65; 2025: 62; 2026: 25.

170 papers.

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  1. 2023LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPScited by 436
  2. 2023DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenescited by 360
  3. 2024Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splattingcited by 221
  4. 2023Panacea: Panoramic and Controllable Video Generation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 168
  5. 2024OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstructioncited by 161
  6. 2023NeuRAD: Neural Rendering for Autonomous Drivingcited by 150
  7. 2023Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Renderingcited by 143
  8. 2024HUGS: Holistic Urban 3D Scene Understanding via Gaussian Splattingcited by 142
  9. 2024DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representationcited by 123
  10. 2024UniScene: Unified Occupancy-centric Driving Scene Generationcited by 106
  11. 2024textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Drivingcited by 105
  12. 2024DriveArena: A Closed-loop Generative Simulation Platform for Autonomous Drivingcited by 98
38 more
  1. 2023WoVoGen: World Volume-aware Diffusion for Controllable Multi-camera Driving Scene Generationcited by 93
  2. 2024Editable Scene Simulation for Autonomous Driving via Collaborative LLM-Agentscited by 91
  3. 2024HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Drivingcited by 90
  4. 2024ReconDreamer: Crafting World Models for Driving Scene Reconstruction via Online Restorationcited by 89
  5. 2025RAD: Training an End-to-End Driving Policy via Large-Scale 3DGS-based Reinforcement Learningcited by 79
  6. 2023UniPAD: A Universal Pre-training Paradigm for Autonomous Drivingcited by 73
  7. 2024Large Spatial Model: End-to-end Unposed Images to Semantic 3Dcited by 73
  8. 2025Impromptu VLA: Open Weights and Open Data for Driving Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 60
  9. 2024InfiniCube: Unbounded and Controllable Dynamic 3D Driving Scene Generation with World-Guided Video Modelscited by 56
  10. 2024STORM: Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction Model for Large-Scale Outdoor Scenescited by 55
  11. 2024P-MapNet: Far-seeing Map Generator Enhanced by both SDMap and HDMap Priorscited by 54
  12. 2024FreeVS: Generative View Synthesis on Free Driving Trajectorycited by 53
  13. 2024AutoSplat: Constrained Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving Scene Reconstructioncited by 52
  14. 2024StreetCrafter: Street View Synthesis with Controllable Video Diffusion Modelscited by 49
  15. 2024Co-Occ: Coupling Explicit Feature Fusion with Volume Rendering Regularization for Multi-Modal 3D Semantic Occupancy Predictioncited by 48
  16. 2023PAD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detectioncited by 46
  17. 2024DeSiRe-GS: 4D Street Gaussians for Static-Dynamic Decomposition and Surface Reconstruction for Urban Driving Scenescited by 45
  18. 2025FastGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting in 100 Secondscited by 43
  19. 2024SA-GS: Scale-Adaptive Gaussian Splatting for Training-Free Anti-Aliasingcited by 41
  20. 2024SGD: Street View Synthesis with Gaussian Splatting and Diffusion Priorcited by 36
  21. 2025ReconDreamer++: Harmonizing Generative and Reconstructive Models for Driving Scene Representationcited by 36
  22. 2024Dynamic 3D Gaussian Fields for Urban Areascited by 35
  23. 2024DreamDrive: Generative 4D Scene Modeling from Street View Imagescited by 35
  24. 2024DrivingSphere: Building a High-fidelity 4D World for Closed-loop Simulationcited by 34
  25. 2024Spectrally Pruned Gaussian Fields with Neural Compensationcited by 33
  26. 2024G3R: Gradient Guided Generalizable Reconstructioncited by 31
  27. 2024FreeSim: Toward Free-viewpoint Camera Simulation in Driving Scenescited by 30
  28. 2023Data-driven Traffic Simulation: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 29
  29. 2023Towards Knowledge-driven Autonomous Drivingcited by 29
  30. 2024DrivingRecon: Large 4D Gaussian Reconstruction Model For Autonomous Drivingcited by 29
  31. 2024S-NeRF++: Autonomous Driving Simulation via Neural Reconstruction and Generationcited by 28
  32. 2025ReconDreamer-RL: Enhancing Reinforcement Learning via Diffusion-based Scene Reconstructioncited by 27
  33. 2023Rethinking Imitation-based Planner for Autonomous Drivingcited by 25
  34. 2024GauStudio: A Modular Framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting and Beyondcited by 25
  35. 2024VEGS: View Extrapolation of Urban Scenes in 3D Gaussian Splatting using Learned Priorscited by 25
  36. 2025CoDa-4DGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting with Context and Deformation Awareness for Autonomous Drivingcited by 25
  37. 2024Forging Vision Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving: Challenges, Methodologies, and Opportunitiescited by 24
  38. 2025PUGS: Zero-shot Physical Understanding with Gaussian Splattingcited by 24

50 most cited of 170 All 170 (JSON)