# From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19654/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 69 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [Embodied and robot world models](https://mlsanity.com/wm/embodied-and-robot-world-models/)
- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Generative simulation for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/generative-simulation-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [MagicVideo: Efficient Video Generation With Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11018/) (2022)
- [DriveGPT4: Interpretable End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01412/) (2023)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [DriveLaW:Unifying Planning and Video Generation in a Latent Driving World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23421/) (2025)
- [DSpark: Confidence-Scheduled Speculative Decoding with Semi-Autoregressive Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05147/) (2026)
- [DriveVA: Video Action Models are Zero-Shot Drivers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04198/) (2026)
- [DriveDreamer-Policy: A Geometry-Grounded World-Action Model for Unified Generation and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01765/) (2026)
- [EponaV2: Driving World Model with Comprehensive Future Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14696/) (2026)
- [Bridging Scene Generation and Planning: Driving with World Model via Unifying Vision and Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14948/) (2026)
- [ExploreVLA: Dense World Modeling and Exploration for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02714/) (2026)
- [CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10426/) (2026)
- [DynVLA: Learning World Dynamics for Action Reasoning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11041/) (2026)
- [Uni-World VLA: Interleaved World Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27287/) (2026)
- [Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15869/) (2026)
- [UNIVERSE: Unified Video Action Models for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Mask-Modulated Modality Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05133/) (2026)
- [SimWAM: A Simple World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07468/) (2026)
- [The DAWN of World-Action Interactive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11550/) (2026)
- [Beyond Imitation: Learning Safe End-to-End Autonomous Driving from Hard Negatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19771/) (2026)
- [ProDrive: Proactive Planning for Autonomous Driving via Ego-Environment Co-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25329/) (2026)
- [RISE: Adaptive Imagination for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20430/) (2026)
- [GeoWAM: Visual Geometry World Action Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23486/) (2026)
- [ReWorld: Representation Learning for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27504/) (2026)
- [SUV: Future Scene Understanding as Video Generation for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03084/) (2026)
- [MCP-Cosmos: World Model-Augmented Agents for Complex Task Execution in MCP Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09131/) (2026)
- [Unified Driving Tokens: Representation- and Geometry-Guided Discrete Tokenizer for Driving World Models and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01935/) (2026)
- [SimVTA: Simulation-Grounded Video-Trajectory Alignment for Driving World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13781/) (2026)
- [LiAuto-GeoX: Efficient Grounded Driving Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05774/) (2026)
- [DF3: World Modeling via Decoder-Free Feature Forecasting in Autonomous Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02428/) (2026)
- [ADAPT: Physics-Aware Diffusion-based World Models for Adaptive Predictive Transferable HVAC Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19804/) (2026)
- [Aligning Multi-Trajectory Supervision with Policy Optimization for VLA Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30122/) (2026)
- [WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30436/) (2026)
- [RoXDrive: Closed-Loop Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Action-Faithful Rollouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36851/) (2026)
- [PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37970/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite remarkable progress in driving world models, their potential for autonomous systems remains largely untapped: the world models are mostly learned for world simulation and decoupled from trajectory planning. While recent efforts aim to unify world modeling and planning in a single framework, the synergistic facilitation mechanism of world modeling for planning still requires further exploration. In this work, we introduce a new driving paradigm named Policy World Model (PWM), which not only integrates world modeling and trajectory planning within a unified architecture, but is also able to benefit planning using the learned world knowledge through the proposed action-free future state forecasting scheme. Through collaborative state-action prediction, PWM can mimic the human-like anticipatory perception, yielding more reliable planning performance. To facilitate the efficiency of video forecasting, we further introduce a dynamically enhanced parallel token generation mechanism, equipped with a context-guided tokenizer and an adaptive dynamic focal loss. Despite utilizing only front camera input, our method matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-view and multi-modal inputs. Code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/6550Zhao/Policy-World-Model.
