OccStress: Stress-Testing the 4D Occupancy Forecasting Chain

Occupancy world models use historical occupancy states to forecast future 3D scenes, but their robustness under corrupted temporal inputs remains poorly understood. Existing evaluations primarily emphasize clean forecasting accuracy and provide limited evidence about how errors enter, persist, and propagate through the occupancy perception-forecasting chain. This paper introduces OccStress, a robustness stress-testing benchmark for the occupancy forecasting chain. OccStress contains 21 corruption families with 61 severity configurations and 10,827 strict temporal anchors across 3 datasets. OccStress covers both 3D occupancy perception and 4D occupancy forecasting through two complementary tracks. This design separates model-mediated pipeline errors under standardized sensor stressors from the intrinsic sensitivity of 4D forecasting models to corrupted occupancy states. OccStress further defines temporal injection protocols to test whether errors in the current state, recent history, or earlier history affect future forecasts differently. OccStress provides aggregate metrics for evaluating robustness along the occupancy forecasting chain. Experiments with five 4D forecasters reveal that current occupancy models are substantially affected by both upstream prediction errors and direct state corruptions, and that clean performance alone is an insufficient description of source- and position-specific robustness. Code, data, and evaluation tools are available at https://insailab.org/OccStress.