# GenieDrive: Towards Physics-Aware Driving World Model with 4D Occupancy Guided Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12751 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12751/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 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 64 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 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/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (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)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [Occ3D: A Large-Scale 3D Occupancy Prediction Benchmark for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14365/) (2023)
- [Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17918/) (2023)
- [MagicDrive: Street View Generation with Diverse 3D Geometry Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02601/) (2023)
- [GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11502/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [MultiWorld: Scalable Multi-Agent Multi-View Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18564/) (2026)
- [OmniDrive: An LLM-Choreographed Multi-Agent World Model with Unified Latent Co-Compression for Multi-View Driving Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17536/) (2026)
- [OpenLongTail: Generative Scaling of Long-Tail Driving Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09655/) (2026)
- [EO-WM: A Physically Informed World Model for Probabilistic Earth Observation Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27277/) (2026)
- [muSync-GS: Physics-Synchronized Driving Video Synthesis for Weather and Geometric Road Hazards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04412/) (2026)
- [OccStress: Stress-Testing the 4D Occupancy Forecasting Chain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15621/) (2025)
- [OccDirector: Language-Guided Behavior and Interaction Generation in 4D Occupancy Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22240/) (2026)
- [AnyScene: Towards Highly Controllable Driving Scene Generation at Anywhere and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26113/) (2026)
- [Generation of Vectorized Maps Beyond Vehicle View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07511/) (2026)
- [PhysFlow: Physics-Aware Optical Flow for Motion Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08215/) (2026)
- [TerrainForge: Physics-Grounded Road Geometry Editing for Counterfactual Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Physics-aware driving world model is essential for drive planning, out-of-distribution data synthesis, and closed-loop evaluation. However, existing methods often rely on a single diffusion model to directly map driving actions to videos, which makes learning difficult and leads to physically inconsistent outputs. To overcome these challenges, we propose GenieDrive, a novel framework designed for physics-aware driving video generation. Our approach starts by generating 4D occupancy, which serves as a physics-informed foundation for subsequent video generation. 4D occupancy contains rich physical information, including high-resolution 3D structures and dynamics. To facilitate effective compression of such high-resolution occupancy, we propose a VAE that encodes occupancy into a latent tri-plane representation, reducing the latent size to only 58% of that used in previous methods. We further introduce Mutual Control Attention (MCA) to accurately model the influence of control on occupancy evolution, and we jointly train the VAE and the subsequent prediction module in an end-to-end manner to maximize forecasting accuracy. Together, these designs yield a 7.2% improvement in forecasting mIoU at an inference speed of 41 FPS, while using only 3.47 M parameters. Additionally, a Normalized Multi-View Attention is introduced in the video generation model to generate multi-view driving videos with guidance from our 4D occupancy, significantly improving video quality with a 20.7% reduction in FVD. Experiments demonstrate that GenieDrive enables highly controllable, multi-view consistent, and physics-aware driving video generation.