# AdaWM: Adaptive World Model based Planning for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13072 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13072/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 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 15 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-autonomous-driving/)
- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Generative simulation for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/generative-simulation-for-driving/)
- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for autonomous driving and traffic](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-autonomous-driving-and-traffic/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [Towards Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13624/) (2021)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09777/) (2023)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Model-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02057/) (2019)
- [MoDem: Accelerating Visual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05698/) (2022)
- [Think2Drive: Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Thinking in Latent World Model for Quasi-Realistic Autonomous Driving (in CARLA-v2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16720/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning using Rectified Linear Units (ReLU)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08375/) (2018)
- [Planning with Adaptive World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10714/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16732/) (2025)
- [3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07996/) (2025)
- [WOD-E2E: Waymo Open Dataset for End-to-End Driving in Challenging Long-tail Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26125/) (2025)
- [A Survey: Learning Embodied Intelligence from Physical Simulators and World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00917/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [The Role of World Models in Shaping Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10498/) (2025)
- [DriveVA: Video Action Models are Zero-Shot Drivers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04198/) (2026)
- [AdaJEPA: An Adaptive Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.32026/) (2026)
- [Reinforced Refinement with Self-Aware Expansion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09800/) (2025)
- [DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09701/) (2026)
- [SimWAM: A Simple World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07468/) (2026)
- [World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19836/) (2026)
- [DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06055/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Reinforcement Learning-Based Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving: Lessons Learned from a Driving Task Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23650/) (2025)
- [Towards a Generalizable Bimanual Foundation Policy via Flow-based Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24156/) (2025)
- [Driving Beyond Privilege: Distilling Dense-Reward Knowledge into Sparse-Reward Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04279/) (2025)
- [Argus: Resilience-Oriented Safety Assurance Framework for End-to-End ADSs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09032/) (2025)
- [nnMobileNet++: Towards Efficient Hybrid Networks for Retinal Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01273/) (2025)
- [SimVTA: Simulation-Grounded Video-Trajectory Alignment for Driving World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13781/) (2026)
- [CoIRL-AD: Collaborative-Competitive Imitation-Reinforcement Learning in Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12560/) (2025)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Modeling and Simulation of Mixed Automated and Human Traffic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12857/) (2026)
- [Reason--Imagine--Act: Closed-Loop LLM Decision Making with World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24004/) (2026)
- [PlanRL: A Trajectory Planning Architecture for Reinforcement Learning-based Driving Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26858/) (2026)
- [A Survey on End-to-End Autonomous Driving Training from the Perspectives of Data, Strategy, and Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World model based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomous driving, which learns a latent dynamics model and uses it to train a planning policy. To speed up the learning process, the pretrain-finetune paradigm is often used, where online RL is initialized by a pretrained model and a policy learned offline. However, naively performing such initialization in RL may result in dramatic performance degradation during the online interactions in the new task. To tackle this challenge, we first analyze the performance degradation and identify two primary root causes therein: the mismatch of the planning policy and the mismatch of the dynamics model, due to distribution shift. We further analyze the effects of these factors on performance degradation during finetuning, and our findings reveal that the choice of finetuning strategies plays a pivotal role in mitigating these effects. We then introduce AdaWM, an Adaptive World Model based planning method, featuring two key steps: (a) mismatch identification, which quantifies the mismatches and informs the finetuning strategy, and (b) alignment-driven finetuning, which selectively updates either the policy or the model as needed using efficient low-rank updates. Extensive experiments on the challenging CARLA driving tasks demonstrate that AdaWM significantly improves the finetuning process, resulting in more robust and efficient performance in autonomous driving systems.