# Ego-centric Learning of Communicative World Models for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08149 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08149/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 50 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 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 / [Multi-agent reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/multi-agent-reinforcement-learning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02275/) (2017)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (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)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [When to Trust Your Model: Model-Based Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08253/) (2019)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00444/) (2020)
- [Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06676/) (2016)
- [Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: A Selective Overview of Theories and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10635/) (2019)
- [Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00374/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Learning Multiagent Communication with Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07736/) (2016)
- [V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10638/) (2022)
- [Is Independent Learning All You Need in the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09533/) (2020)
- [Improving Sample Efficiency in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01741/) (2019)
- [TarMAC: Targeted Multi-Agent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11187/) (2018)
- [Fully Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Networked Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08757/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08265/) (2021)
- [Learning Attentional Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07733/) (2018)
- [Cooper: Cooperative Perception for Connected Autonomous Vehicles based on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05265/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Model-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02057/) (2019)
- [Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05324/) (2022)
- [Cooperative Perception for 3D Object Detection in Driving Scenarios using Infrastructure Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12147/) (2019)
- [Interpretable End-to-end Urban Autonomous Driving with Latent Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08726/) (2020)
- [Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning for Urban Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09503/) (2019)
- [The Predictron: End-To-End Learning and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08810/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16732/) (2025)
- [GenAI-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning towards Distributed Agent Intelligence: A Generative-RL Agent Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09495/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for tasks in complex high-dimensional environments, such as autonomous driving. MARL is known to suffer from the textitpartial observability and textitnon-stationarity issues. To tackle these challenges, information sharing is often employed, which however faces major hurdles in practice, including overwhelming communication overhead and scalability concerns. By making use of generative AI embodied in world model together with its latent representation, we develop it CALL, underlineCommunicunderlineative Worunderlineld Modeunderlinel, for MARL, where 1) each agent first learns its world model that encodes its state and intention into low-dimensional latent representation with smaller memory footprint, which can be shared with other agents of interest via lightweight communication; and 2) each agent carries out ego-centric learning while exploiting lightweight information sharing to enrich her world model, and then exploits its generalization capacity to improve prediction for better planning. We characterize the gain on the prediction accuracy from the information sharing and its impact on performance gap. Extensive experiments are carried out on the challenging local trajectory planning tasks in the CARLA platform to demonstrate the performance gains of using textitCALL.