# HorizonDrive: Self-Corrective Autoregressive World Model for Long-horizon Driving Simulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11596 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11596/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 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 58 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

## 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 58)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [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)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13447/) (2025)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17918/) (2023)
- [LongLive: Real-time Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22622/) (2025)
- [Seedance 1.0: Exploring the Boundaries of Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09113/) (2025)
- [StoryDiffusion: Consistent Self-Attention for Long-Range Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01434/) (2024)
- [Rolling Forcing: Autoregressive Long Video Diffusion in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25161/) (2025)
- [Self-Forcing++: Towards Minute-Scale High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02283/) (2025)
- [DriveDreamer-2: LLM-Enhanced World Models for Diverse Driving Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06845/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [M4World: A Multi-view Multimodal Driving World Model for Interactive Object Manipulation and Minute-long Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14005/) (2026)
- [ZYT-World: A Real-Time Controllable World Model for Closed-Loop Autonomous-Driving Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21712/) (2026)
- [HelloWorld: Towards Practical Applications of Generative Driving World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28931/) (2026)
- [FlowSim: Rendering-Free Closed-Loop Simulation for Evaluating End-to-End Driving Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18030/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Closed-loop driving simulation requires real-time interaction beyond short offline clips, pushing current driving world models toward autoregressive (AR) rollout. Existing AR distillation approaches typically rely on frame sinks or student-side degradation training. The former transfers poorly to driving due to fast ego-motion and rapid scene changes, while the latter remains bounded by the teacher's single-pass output length and thus provides only a limited supervision horizon. A natural question is: can the teacher itself be extended via AR rollout to provide unbounded-horizon supervision at bounded memory cost? The key difficulty is that a standard teacher drifts under its own predictions, contaminating the supervision it provides. Our key insight is to make the teacher rollout-capable, ensuring reliable supervision from its own AR rollouts. This is instantiated as HorizonDrive, an anti-drifting training-and-distillation framework for AR driving simulation. First, scheduled rollout recovery (SRR) trains the base model to reconstruct ground-truth future clips from prediction-corrupted histories, yielding a teacher that remains stable across long AR rollouts. Second, the rollout-capable teacher is extended via AR rollout, providing long-horizon distribution-matching supervision under bounded memory, while a short-window student aligns to it with teacher rollout DMD (TRD) for efficient real-time deployment. HorizonDrive natively supports minute-scale AR rollout under bounded memory; on nuScenes, HorizonDrive reduces FID by 52% and FVD by 37%, and lowers ARE and DTW by 21% and 9% relative to the strongest long-horizon streaming baselines, while remaining competitive with single-pass driving video generators.