mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

U4D: Uncertainty-Aware 4D World Modeling from LiDAR Sequences

arXiv 2512.02982 ↗First posted 2 Dec 2025cs.CV cs.ROcited by 7

On the map: World models → World modeling from LiDAR generation

Abstract (arXiv)

Modeling dynamic 3D environments from LiDAR sequences is central to building reliable 4D worlds for autonomous driving and embodied AI. Existing generative frameworks, however, often treat all spatial regions uniformly, overlooking the varying uncertainty across real-world scenes. This uniform generation leads to artifacts in complex or ambiguous regions, limiting realism and temporal stability. In this work, we present U4D, an uncertainty-aware framework for 4D LiDAR world modeling. Our approach first estimates spatial uncertainty maps from a pretrained segmentation model to localize semantically challenging regions. It then performs generation in a "hard-to-easy" manner through two sequential stages: (1) uncertainty-region modeling, which reconstructs high-entropy regions with fine geometric fidelity, and (2) uncertainty-conditioned completion, which synthesizes the remaining areas under learned structural priors. To further ensure temporal coherence, U4D incorporates a mixture of spatio-temporal (MoST) block that adaptively fuses spatial and temporal representations during diffusion. Extensive experiments show that U4D produces geometrically faithful and temporally consistent LiDAR sequences, advancing the reliability of 4D world modeling for autonomous perception and simulation.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in World modeling from LiDAR generation, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 94 of its 122 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2025.

Builds on

94 of 122 references.

Closest ancestors · 14

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025LiDARCrafter: Dynamic 4D World Modeling from LiDAR Sequences5 Aug
  2. 2025Veila: Panoramic LiDAR Generation from a Monocular RGB Image5 Aug
  3. 2025Perspective-Invariant 3D Object Detection23 Jul
  4. 2025SPIRAL: Semantic-Aware Progressive LiDAR Scene Generation and Understanding28 May
  5. 2025WeatherGen: A Unified Diverse Weather Generator for LiDAR Point Clouds via Spider Mamba Diffusion18 Apr
  6. 2024Fast LiDAR Data Generation with Rectified Flows3 Dec
  7. 2024Text2LiDAR: Text-guided LiDAR Point Cloud Generation via Equirectangular Transformer29 Jul
  8. 2024Towards Realistic Scene Generation with LiDAR Diffusion Models31 Mar
  9. 2024RangeLDM: Fast Realistic LiDAR Point Cloud Generation15 Mar
  10. 2023LiDAR Data Synthesis with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models17 Sep
  11. 2023Rethinking Range View Representation for LiDAR Segmentation9 Mar
  12. 2022Learning to Generate Realistic LiDAR Point Clouds8 Sep
2 more
  1. 2017PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space7 Jun
  2. 2016PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation2 Dec

Other references · 80

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2019PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Librarycited by 20,305
  3. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,355
  4. 2017On Calibration of Modern Neural Networkscited by 4,960
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  6. 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,523
  7. 2015Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learningcited by 4,448
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  9. 2015ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repositorycited by 2,897
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  11. 2017What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?cited by 2,352
  12. 2018PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Cloudscited by 1,715
38 more
  1. 20194D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 1,208
  2. 2020Center-based 3D Object Detection and Trackingcited by 1,144
  3. 2018Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertaintycited by 732
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  6. 2021KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3Dcited by 575
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  10. 2020Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentationcited by 389
  11. 2024Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllabilitycited by 347
  12. 2020PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentationcited by 275
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  17. 20193D Point Cloud Generative Adversarial Network Based on Tree Structured Graph Convolutionscited by 173
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  31. 2020LiDAR-based Panoptic Segmentation via Dynamic Shifting Networkcited by 84
  32. 2021SetVAE: Learning Hierarchical Composition for Generative Modeling of Set-Structured Datacited by 78
  33. 2023UltraLiDAR: Learning Compact Representations for LiDAR Completion and Generationcited by 78
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  38. 2023UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebasecited by 57

50 most cited of 80 All 80 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 6.

7 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Learning to Generate 4D LiDAR Sequences
  2. 2025B4DL: A Benchmark for 4D LiDAR LLM in Spatio-Temporal Understanding
  3. 2025LiSTAR: Ray-Centric World Models for 4D LiDAR Sequences in Autonomous Driving
  4. 20264D-WAM: 4D Consistent World Modeling for Autonomous Driving
  5. 2025DriveLiDAR4D: Sequential and Controllable LiDAR Scene Generation for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2026GEM: Generating LiDAR World Model via Deformable Mamba
  7. 2025LaGen: Towards Autoregressive LiDAR Scene Generation
  8. 2023Copilot4D: Learning Unsupervised World Models for Autonomous Driving via Discrete Diffusion