# SymDrive: Realistic and Controllable Driving Simulator via Symmetric Auto-regressive Online Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21618 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21618/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01898/) (2023)
- [MagicDrive: Street View Generation with Diverse 3D Geometry Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02601/) (2023)
- [Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01339/) (2024)
- [EmerNeRF: Emergent Spatial-Temporal Scene Decomposition via Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02077/) (2023)
- [ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08052/) (2025)
- [Guided Conditional Diffusion for Controllable Traffic Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17366/) (2022)
- [OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16760/) (2024)
- [Difix3D+: Improving 3D Reconstructions with Single-Step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01774/) (2025)
- [NeuRAD: Neural Rendering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15260/) (2023)
- [Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18561/) (2023)
- [DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13571/) (2024)
- [Language-Guided Traffic Simulation via Scene-Level Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06344/) (2023)
- [TrafficGen: Learning to Generate Diverse and Realistic Traffic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06609/) (2022)
- [textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20323/) (2024)
- [DriveArena: A Closed-loop Generative Simulation Platform for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00415/) (2024)
- [HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01718/) (2024)
- [ReconDreamer: Crafting World Models for Driving Scene Reconstruction via Online Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19548/) (2024)
- [Language Conditioned Traffic Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07947/) (2023)
- [World Models for Autonomous Driving: An Initial Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02622/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DriveFix: Spatio-Temporally Coherent Driving Scene Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16306/) (2026)
- [DecoupleGS: Interactive 3D Gaussian Splatting for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01761/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-fidelity and controllable 3D simulation is essential for addressing the long-tail data scarcity in Autonomous Driving (AD), yet existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve photorealistic rendering and interactive traffic editing. Current approaches often falter in large-angle novel view synthesis and suffer from geometric or lighting artifacts during asset manipulation. To address these challenges, we propose SymDrive, a unified diffusion-based framework capable of joint high-quality rendering and scene editing. We introduce a Symmetric Auto-regressive Online Restoration paradigm, which constructs paired symmetric views to recover fine-grained details via a ground-truth-guided dual-view formulation and utilizes an auto-regressive strategy for consistent lateral view generation. Furthermore, we leverage this restoration capability to enable a training-free harmonization mechanism, treating vehicle insertion as context-aware inpainting to ensure seamless lighting and shadow consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SymDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance in both novel-view enhancement and realistic 3D vehicle insertion.