# LiSTAR: Ray-Centric World Models for 4D LiDAR Sequences in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16049/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World modeling from LiDAR generation, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 60 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [World modeling from LiDAR generation](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-modeling-from-lidar-generation/)
- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Generative simulation for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/generative-simulation-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13447/) (2025)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [MAGVIT: Masked Generative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05199/) (2022)
- [A Structured Self-attentive Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03130/) (2017)
- [MagicDrive: Street View Generation with Diverse 3D Geometry Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02601/) (2023)
- [Volumetric and Multi-View CNNs for Object Classification on 3D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03265/) (2016)
- [OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16038/) (2023)
- [DriveDreamer-2: LLM-Enhanced World Models for Diverse Driving Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06845/) (2024)
- [GAIA-2: A Controllable Multi-View Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20523/) (2025)
- [Video Probabilistic Diffusion Models in Projected Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07685/) (2023)
- [LiDARsim: Realistic LiDAR Simulation by Leveraging the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09348/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthesizing high-fidelity and controllable 4D LiDAR data is crucial for creating scalable simulation environments for autonomous driving. This task is inherently challenging due to the sensor's unique spherical geometry, the temporal sparsity of point clouds, and the complexity of dynamic scenes. To address these challenges, we present LiSTAR, a novel generative world model that operates directly on the sensor's native geometry. LiSTAR introduces a Hybrid-Cylindrical-Spherical (HCS) representation to preserve data fidelity by mitigating quantization artifacts common in Cartesian grids. To capture complex dynamics from sparse temporal data, it utilizes a Spatio-Temporal Attention with Ray-Centric Transformer (START) that explicitly models feature evolution along individual sensor rays for robust temporal coherence. Furthermore, for controllable synthesis, we propose a novel 4D point cloud-aligned voxel layout for conditioning and a corresponding discrete Masked Generative START (MaskSTART) framework, which learns a compact, tokenized representation of the scene, enabling efficient, high-resolution, and layout-guided compositional generation. Comprehensive experiments validate LiSTAR's state-of-the-art performance across 4D LiDAR reconstruction, prediction, and conditional generation, with substantial quantitative gains: reducing generation MMD by a massive 76%, improving reconstruction IoU by 32%, and lowering prediction L1 Med by 50%. This level of performance provides a powerful new foundation for creating realistic and controllable autonomous systems simulations. Project link: https://ocean-luna.github.io/LiSTAR.gitub.io.